ART REVIEW : When Cartoons and Large Paintings Collide

Using cartoons as the basis for large-scale paintings is risky business. It’s difficult to translate comic-book imagery to canvases that measure more than 6-by-5-feet, without resorting to pretense. Pulling off such a feat requires a little talent, a lot of panache and even more luck.

Christian Schumann’s 11 new paintings at Ruth Bloom Gallery fall short in all three categories. Their size and messages are wildly out of sync with the glib, comic-strip style in which they’re rendered.

Boldly emblazoned (in a stylish variety of typefaces) across the lower part of one painting is the announcement: “Things Are Going to Get Worse.” Like an apocalyptic bumper sticker, written backward so you can read it in your rearview mirror, another image baldly declares its contempt for Pat Boone. Both try to substitute MTV immediacy for the more drawn-out demands and lasting resonance of traditional painting.

It’s as if the 24-year-old New York-based artist wants his viewers to be gripped by existential dread, when he can’t himself be bothered with such troublesome sentiments or time-consuming considerations. Schumann’s abbreviated treatment of despair, Angst and torpor has the feel of being vainglorious--if cartoons can claim this level of emotional impact.

Two smaller pictures recount superficially horrific tales involving incest and excrement. The rest of Schumann’s paintings consist of compact rectangles filled with abstract patterns, stylized flowers, puddles of puke, diagrammatic droplets, simplified portraits, demented variations on the smiley-face button and blobs of mutant flesh.

In contrast to the cartoon-inspired art of Jim Shaw and Lari Pittman, Schumann’s images look facile and overproduced. Rather than piecing together compelling visions, these patchwork paintings simply fill up space, as if all they demand of viewers is that we bide our time before them, until something more interesting comes along.

* Ruth Bloom Gallery, 2036 Broadway, Santa Monica, (310) 829-7454, through June 30. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Huichol Yarns: Fourteen beautiful yarn “paintings” at Bryce Bannatyne Gallery depict some of the myths and rituals sacred to the Huichol people of Western Mexico’s mountainous region. Each brightly colored panel is a jam-packed extravaganza that combines abstract patterns and figurative symbols in animated compositions whose visual energy is often thrilling.

The centerpiece of the show is an 8-by-4-foot image depicting “The Fiesta of the Corn of the Five Colors,” in which men, women and children, as well as plants, streams, beasts and gods commingle in a festive celebration of life’s interconnectedness. Every inch of the picture has been expertly used by Cresencio Perez Robles, the artist who composed the jubilant scene by pressing thousands of feet of yarn into a layer of warm wax that covers a sheet of wood.

Vibrant juxtapositions of colors, crisp graphic designs and the yarn’s soft texture make for bold, arresting images that are visually engaging, even if you don’t know the stories they tell. This is appropriate, since the Huichol do not make these works for themselves, only to sell to tourists and collectors outside their communities.

* Bryce Bannatyne Gallery, 2439 Main St., Santa Monica, (310) 396-9668, through June 11. Closed Mondays.