ART REVIEWS : ‘Facts and Figures’: When Metaphors Replace Objectivity

“Facts and Figures: Selections From the Lannan Foundation Collection” is a rich, stimulating exhibition in which numbers don’t add up and facts never speak for themselves.

Inspiring profound doubt, this 14-artist show also invites poetic license. As viewers are called upon to interpret its 45 representational images, subjective impulses intermingle with mute objectivity, charging the installation with psychological complexity.

Jim Shaw’s small, flat-footed pencil drawings of newspaper pictures, Vija Celmins’ meditative painting of the night sky and Thomas Ruff’s gigantic, passport-style photos of expressionless German youths treat their subjects neutrally. Simultaneously, these works declare that facts are not neutral entities that can be precisely calculated, but loaded occurrences whose significance depends upon one’s perspective, desires and beliefs.

Gary Hill’s two mesmerizing video installations amplify the ambiguity at the root of human experience. In “Tall Ships,” viewers enter a long, dark corridor on the walls of which are projected 12 separate images of ordinary people standing or sitting in the distance. As you pass each one, it appears to come forth from the void, as if to greet you. These ghostly figures walk back into the shadows only after you turn away, creating an unsettling, mirror-relationship between their spectral intangibility and your fleshy mortality.

Hill’s “Inasmuch as It Is Always Already Taking Place” internalizes the sense of dislocation and missed communication central to “Tall Ships.” Consisting of 16 disemboweled monitors and a tangle of cables set in a deep niche in the wall, this quasi-anonymous piece of self-portraiture intimates that human bodies are mysterious landscapes, to which their inhabitants pay too little attention.

Likewise, Chuck Close’s gridded, part-by-part portrait of painter Alex Katz painstakingly measures the distance between a person and his physical appearance. “American Costume,” David Hammons’ monoprint of his face surrounded by his fingerprints in the shape of an Afro, poignantly marks the territory where self-determination collides with social prejudice.

Cindy Sherman’s five black-and-white photographs of her face, made up to look like five different people, humorously records how individual identity forms at the points where stereotypes break down. Putting a hilarious spin on the idea that commonly accepted facts were once outlandish fictions, Jeffrey Vallance’s “Relics From Two Vatican Performances” locates myth-making power in the hands of creative observers.

Gerhard Richter’s paintings of sexy women and of a heavily lipsticked mouth that looks more animal than human link the exhibition to Andy Warhol’s art, where the embrace of superficiality was loaded with deep ambivalence. Always ambiguous, even when they seem to be most straightforward, the pictures in “Facts and Figures” begin where objectivity falls short and metaphors take over.

* Lannan Foundation, 5401 McConnell Ave., Marina del Rey, (310) 306-1004, through Feb . 26. Closed for the holidays; reopening Tuesday.

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Overworked and Unfinished: James Trivers is an eccentric, L.A.-based wit whose books, paintings and prints have, in the past, been wickedly funny, even outrageously original. But his seven muddled pictures at Newspace look overworked and unfinished, with or without the cheap, 3-D glasses you’re supposed to wear when viewing them.

To the naked eye, Trivers’ diamond-shaped paintings resemble plaid fabrics whose stripes are not properly aligned and whose colors are smeared and smudged, as if they’ve been dyed too many times or accidentally printed on both sides before having dried. Ballerinas, marines, flying ducks, domestic scenes, a smiley face and horses engaged in human foreplay are only some of the characters in the artist’s loose compositions.

Donning the glasses clears up some of the muddiness but causes other problems. Trivers’ paintings, seen through blue and red lenses, sometimes exaggerate the effects of collage, appearing to be superimposed images that hover on the same plane. For the most part, however, the 3-D glasses don’t significantly alter the works. The main difference is that wearing them gives you a headache.

At his best, Trivers delivers off-base, on-target attacks on conventional wisdom. Though his art often makes scathing sense by reveling in absurdity, this time around it has the presence of a cliche. These paintings fail to generate sufficient energy to get past the clever, tongue-in-cheek humor with which they begin.

* Newspace, 5241 Melrose Ave., (213) 469-9353, through Jan . 7. Closed for the holidays; reopening Tuesday.

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One-Work Show: Frighteningly few contemporary artists make work so compelling that a single painting, slightly larger than easel-scale, is captivating, powerful or noteworthy enough to be an exhibition unto itself. For Llyn Foulkes, who hasn’t had a solo show here since 1983, even to think of mounting a one-work exhibition is so ridiculous that actually doing so just might make some kind of perverse sense.

Unfortunately, Foulkes’ solitary self-portrait at Patricia Faure Gallery cannot carry a show. In fact, the veteran L.A.-based painter’s new piece does not even rank among his strongest images: If placed next to paintings included in recent group shows, “The Unfinished Picture” would be the weak link.

As if Foulkes (or his dealer) were aware of the folly of showing only one work, a 45-minute video plays in a back gallery. In it, the artist carries on a frenetic, expressive and occasionally crazed monologue about the development of his work and the difficulties of being an artist in today’s treacherous world.

Fueled by bitterness and paranoia, the tape steals the show. It’s more gripping than the painting because it conveys the lunatic energy that animates Foulkes, shedding insights into his character that don’t come through in the painted portrait.

The video also shows some earlier versions of “The Unfinished Picture,” before Foulkes cut it down to its present size, eliminated a figure and simplified the composition. If this work is truly unfinished, it might be more interesting in the future, when these elements (and some of the video’s lively psychodrama) make their way back into the picture.

* Patricia Faure Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., B7, Santa Monica, (310) 449-1479, through Jan. 21. Closed Saturday for the holiday; reopens Tuesday.

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Picture-Perfect: James Welling’s black-and-white photographs at Regen Projects strive to generate neither excitement nor anger, passion nor disdain. Suffused with just a whiff of once-hip, now musty French theory, and studiously designed to possess only a bit of dumb, American good looks, the New York-based artist’s blandly handsome pictures of people, landscapes and buildings are so presentable, appropriate and pleasant that you feel you’ve seen them before.

Shot in styles that recur in textbooks on the history of photography, Welling’s images are printed with tried-and-true techniques. The subjects they depict are free of controversy. The genres they rehash are thoroughly conventional. These safe pictures could hardly be more middle-of-the-road.

It’s as if the 43-year-old artist’s goal is to dress up the present in the clothes of art history’s official, institutional past. His photos act as if they want to erase the present by inserting it, as nothing more than a footnote, into a narrative that has already been written.

Although the experience of familiarity Welling’s work seeks has been ballyhooed and packaged as an essential aspect of late-Postmodernism, this carefully fabricated sense of deja vu is actually part of an attempt, by wanna-be academics, to control uncertainty and to eliminate the untidiness of unexpected events--such as original works of art.

* Regen Projects, 629 N. Almont Drive, West Hollywood, (310) 276-5424, through Jan . 14. Closed for the holidays; reopening Tuesday.