ART REVIEW : Maxwell Hendler, Master of the Colorful

Color, it is often said, is the component of art that is the most difficult to describe and the most impossible to control. At Patricia Faure Gallery, Maxwell Hendler’s gorgeous monochromes confirm the cliche with ravishing virtuosity.

Hendler’s 10 paintings on panel, spread through four beautifully proportioned galleries and bathed in natural light, form an eccentric rainbow of you-have-to-see-them-to-believe-them colors. Their hues, temperatures and flavors continually shift, depending on the order in which you view them.

In the main gallery, Hendler throws a kink into a conventionally tasteful arrangement of soft, delicate shades of yellow, green and pink. He punctuates his pastels with a slab of electric orange (“Tangee”) and an 8-foot-long slice of translucent blue-green (“Fair Haven”), two super-glossy paintings that are as synthetic as the instant breakfast beverage astronauts used to drink and as natural as the wood grain that ripples beneath the perfectly smooth surface of the other watery image.

For their part, Hendler’s pastels are hardly ordinary. “Medium,” a 3-by-4-foot rectangle of opaque yellow, has the presence of a custard pie that’s lost its flavor from sitting too long in the bakery window. “Tout de Suite” looks like a giant mint candy whose sugar-coating has been completely licked off, exposing a soft, matte interior on the verge of dissolving into a sweet aftertaste.

“Levantine” is so neutral that at different times it appears to be pink, gray, slightly bluish or some other shade of off-white. Its closest point of comparison is to the interior of a refrigerator, a bland backdrop on which the bright colors of packages are reflected in harsh, unnatural light.

Hendler has installed this painting so that when you face it, a work of similar proportions and tone is visible in the vestibule to its right. Juxtaposed to “Infanta,” which seems to glow with a fleshy, plump vitality, “Levantine” appears to be dead, no longer at home with the soothing pastels in the main gallery, but cold, wan and without affect.

In the back gallery, the emotional impact of Hendler’s magnificent colors is condensed in “Aqua Pool,” a horizontal rectangle of vibrant turquoise that appears to be vertical. So powerful is this painting’s vertical pull that you need a tape-measure to determine that it’s actually longer than it is tall, more like a landscape than an abstract icon.

By masterfully manipulating the way color shapes our experiences, and the way our experiences shape what we see, Hendler presents a seemingly simple body of work that turns out to be endlessly fascinating. It’s one of the most potent shows of recent memory.

* Patricia Faure Gallery, 2525 Michigan Ave., Bergamot Station, Santa Monica, (310) 449-1479, through May 27. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Abstractions Over Time: “Four Generations” is a smart, satisfying show that includes two paintings by each of four artists born in successive decades: Michael Venezia in the 1930s, Nancy Haynes in the ‘40s, Christian Haub in the ‘50s and Fandra Chang in the ‘60s. Organized for Woodbury University Art Gallery by painter and critic Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, this exhibition demonstrates that a particular approach to abstraction bears a peculiar relationship to time.

The exhibition’s title doesn’t describe four distinct generations as much as it describes four different attempts to make--or generate--a painting. One of the show’s goals is to get viewers to see that the history of Modernist abstraction ought not be thought of as a linear progression, but as a spiraling movement around a slippery set of issues.

Chang’s mesmerizing images offer a dazzling demonstration of this idea. Each of her four-part pieces consists of coarse- and fine-mesh screens stretched taut over recessed, positive and negative prints made from these screens. The result is a seductive fusion of moire and computer circuitry.

Your eyes are required to mix colors and tones from superimposed layers, as if you’re looking at a microscopic view of an Impressionist painting that’s been filtered, pixilated and projected on top of itself. No component of Chang’s complex, self-referential images seems to be more important than any other.

There are no beginnings or endings to these mirrored doublings and out-of-sync repetitions, in front of which it’s impossible to distinguish originals from duplicates. Everything depends upon one’s willingness to lose one’s bearings before these time-consuming objects.

One of the best things about Gilbert-Rolfe’s exhibition is that no one’s work looks like anyone else’s. Haub’s crisp paintings on wood and plexiglass seem to float free of their supports, hovering like after-images in the charged space between your eyeballs and the wall. Haynes’ ghostly oils glow with a seemingly fluid, photographic light. And Venezia’s troweled blocks of odd colors appear to be distended, off-balance grids, strangely incommensurate with their blocky, geometric grounds.

In contrast to shows based on stylistic continuity and strict generational links, “Four Generations” follows an unpredictable, open-ended agenda. Its paintings cannot be defined as responses to the works of recognized predecessors. Its artists never build upon, modify or reject the achievements of those who precede them. It’s not clear, or important, that they’re even aware of each other.

Rather than fitting their imageless pictures into predetermined versions of art history, these four painters try to fold time back on itself, creating works that function as points of departure for their viewers, with ample space to move in more than one direction at once.

* Woodbury University Art Gallery, 7500 Glenoaks Blvd., Burbank, through May 25. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Too Mean: Initially, Jeff Glab’s sculptures at Crossing Gallery appear to be the fine art equivalent of “Dumb and Dumber.” After a while, however, it becomes clear that his show, titled “Sloppy,” isn’t as sophisticated as the movie.

The main difference is that the young artist’s exhibition lacks the dim-witted charm that saves the movie from being nothing more than a moronic parade of stupid gags. Glab’s assemblages are too mean-spirited to transcend their juvenile delinquency. His crude, kinetic sculptures and rotting found-objects remain rooted in an ugly world of aggressive nastiness.

Welded steel poles anchor the four largest pieces. On one wall, an electric motor thrusts a harpoon-like rod back-and-forth along an 8-foot shaft, dragging a decaying cow’s tongue in its path. A few feet away, a similar shaft runs through five spinning spheres, on which Glab has glued dozens of life-sized crotch-shots clipped from hard-core porno magazines.

Across the gallery, a kiddie pool, caked with dirt, is skewered by another pole, offering a literal illustration of the metaphor “dirty pool.” On the floor, four axle-like shafts criss-cross in a double-X configuration, supporting eight used car tires. Upstairs, three small wall-sculptures consist of rusty metal armatures that pierce Styrofoam spheres, clusters of moldy M&M; candies and decomposing gum balls.

Although “Sloppy” seems meant to make fun of the messiness of sex, especially that of the oral phase, the title actually describes the half-baked thinking on which the exhibition is based.

* Crossing Gallery, 1104 S. La Cienega, (310) 358-9359, through May 20. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Just the Necessities: Karin Sander’s nearly immaterial installation at Burnett Miller Gallery fills the big, sky-lit space with emptiness. When you walk into the gallery, nothing seems to be there. After a moment, you notice sunlight glinting brightly off part of a wall. Suddenly, a shiny, approximately 10-by-6-foot rectangle the artist has made by laboriously sanding and polishing the wall becomes visible.

A similar rectangle occupies the opposite wall, making you wonder how you could have missed them when you entered.

Like nearly invisible paintings, these exceptionally Minimalist pieces dispense with everything but the necessities: a thin, shimmering surface that would be imperceptible if it didn’t deflect rays of light, catching your eyes as they restlessly scan the clean surfaces of the pristine gallery.

With perverse obsessiveness, Sander outdoes the gallery at its own game, pushing its immaculate white walls beyond their ordinary invisibility until they become the art itself. Her works invite perception to chase its own tail, soliciting viewers to pay attention to how they pay attention.

In Sander’s hands, the bare showroom becomes a quiet, meditative space haunted by the luminous trace of painstaking labor. Unfortunately, the gallery’s neutrality detracts from the power of her subtle art, which would be more effective--as it has been in the past--in a less refined package.

* Burnett Miller Gallery, 2525 Michigan Ave., Bergamot Station, Santa Monica, (310) 315-9961, through June. Closed Sundays and Mondays.