ART REVIEWS : Entering a Psychic World of Stimulating Hyperactivity

Brash, obnoxious and cacophonous, Jane Hammond’s overloaded works on paper at Ruth Bloom Gallery exude a peculiarly American exuberance. Transforming everything they touch into mutant sideshow attractions, these maniacal collages reveal a voracious appetite for experience.

Things happen so fast in Hammond’s printed and pasted pictures that there’s not enough time to absorb, digest or process their significance. The point is to move on to the next event, keeping an abbreviated memory of the last one in mind, in the hope that someday it might make an interesting story, if one runs out of things to do.

Push-pinned to the walls, Hammond’s relentless works are dense, stimulating palimpsests that, despite their many overlapping images, never feel crowded or bogged down with a surplus of history. If these cartoon-inspired pictures follow the loose logic of dreams, they lack the gravity of classic, European Surrealism.

In the psychic world described by Hammond’s drawings, there are simply too many things taking place for any one to merit obsession or fixation. Likewise, condensation never takes place.

As if coated with Teflon, the quirky characters in these light-handed depictions are free of the usual traumas and blockages that generate meaning in conventional Freudian psychology. Hyperactivity dispenses with the need for coherent narratives.

Rather than suggesting that a few significant experiences form the core of one’s character, Hammond’s freewheeling constellations of recycled images assert that truly contemporary individuals have no core. In this giddy, center-less world, nothing binds things together but desire’s swift circulation, which, like a shark, must always keep moving.

* Ruth Bloom Gallery, 2036 Broadway, Santa Monica, (310) 829-7454, through Feb. 18. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Cover Stories: Steve Hurd’s big paintings of greatly enlarged magazine covers have the same eye-grabbing impact that causes you to pluck the latest issue from a newsstand rack. His five splashy pictures at Dan Bernier Gallery bank on a similar type of instant attraction and involuntary response.

But after a moment, Hurd’s art loses its seemingly irresistible pull. With a bit of reflection, his painterly renditions of Woman’s Day and Family Circle magazines turn out to be as manipulative, formulaic and empty as their throwaway sources.

In the same way that these weekly publications target a specific segment of the market, Hurd’s well-executed works strive to fit into a particular niche of Modern art history. More than 30 years after the fact, they opportunistically occupy the territory between Andy Warhol’s drippy painting of the front page of the New York Mirror and Roy Lichtenstein’s close-up of a woman’s arm effortlessly sponging an oven to spotless perfection.

Looser and juicier than the cool, mechanical graphics that became Pop’s trademark, Hurd’s hand-painted reproductions hark back to this movement’s origin in the fluid brushwork of Abstract Expressionism. His facile pictures of gooey desserts and domestic accouterments, interspersed with an abundance of words, add very little to this stage of Pop’s development, instead merely rehashing its formal maneuvers by loading more of the same into each composition.

In drawing their content from magazines aimed at middle-class housewives, Hurd’s images play up Pop’s links to domesticity. But rather than exploring or elaborating upon the connections between art and other typically feminine subjects, the young, L.A.-based painter settles for cliches from the 1950s.

His largest piece depicts dozens of empty beer bottles littering mom’s newly redecorated den. Whether Hurd serves up literal images of drunken, macho bravado, or actually imitates messy, gestural paint-slinging, his unadventuresome pictures do little more than illustrate a well-documented shift in styles of American painting.

* Dan Bernier Gallery, 3026 1/2 Nebraska Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 264-4882, through Feb. 2. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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A Sense of Rhythm: Penelope Krebs’ six new paintings at Kiyo Higashi Gallery are more refined and fine-tuned than a similar group she showed last year. Exceptionally sensual, they pulsate with vibrant visual energy.

Although each approximately 2-foot-square panel still consists of 11 vertical bands of intense color separated by narrow black borders, these stunning oils-on-canvas set up more insistent, offbeat rhythms than her earlier works. It is as if the new ones don’t want you to merely look at their saturated, light-absorbing surfaces, but to listen to their meticulously orchestrated movements.

When you first lay eyes on Krebs’ seemingly simple stripe paintings, they look as if they might be the designs for gorgeous circus tents. Pretty quickly, however, their bright, shocking colors lose their initial dissonance and apparently endless expansiveness. The crisp, stark bands settle into surprisingly harmonious, supple and compact compositions. Some approach elegance.

Krebs locks her bright, indescribable colors into coherent wholes by keeping their various chromatic values within tight ranges. More than any other contemporary painter, she has the capacity to make deep, midnight blue feel hot, and jazzy lime-green feel cool.

Linked by similar temperatures, Krebs’ wildly different colors also push and pull against each other, the darkest ones receding furthest and the lightest ones appearing to pop off the picture plane. Like undulating sound waves made visible, these rigorously structured paintings gracefully segue into fluid movements that have the feel of music.

* Kiyo Higashi Gallery, 8332 Melrose Ave., (213) 655-2482, through Feb. 25. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Not Right for Installation: Duck-Hyun Cho is a contemporary artist based in Seoul, Korea, whose overly theatrical exhibition at Dorothy Goldeen Gallery detracts from his consummate draftsmanship.

This is unfortunate because Cho’s considerable talents would be better served if his beautiful, conte-crayon drawings on canvas were not compelled to fit into today’s trendy, international style of installation art. According to this genre’s rules, filling the gallery with ordinary stuff ensures that a viewer’s heart is flooded with poignant meanings and personal memories.

This easy, prefabricated sentimentality diminishes the impact of Cho’s sober, larger-than-life-size portraits of anonymous babies born in Korea and youths who grew up in the Americas. Like a fake life-support system, the clunky wooden boxes that frame them, the bright, clamp-on lamps that illuminate them, and the tangle of cords that connect them bury these otherwise compelling pictures under too many alienating layers.

By recalling such signature materials as Christian Boltanski’s lamps, Jannis Kounellis’ lumber and Keith Sonnier’s electric cords, Cho’s use of extraneous components invites (unfavorable) comparisons to their oeuvres. If his drawings didn’t attempt to be installations, it would be easier to see them on their own legitimate terms.

* Dorothy Goldeen Gallery, 2224 Main St., Santa Monica, (310) 399- 4489, through Feb. 25. Closed Sundays and Mondays.