ART REVIEWS : Durham Landscapes Realm of Romance

Brad Durham’s landscape paintings have always been interesting because they’d rather defy the rules of their genre than fulfill them. Not that Durham is immune to nature’s provocations. If anything, he takes it upon himself to embellish them, turning clumps of foliage into mysterious, sooty forms and evening skies into full-blown orchestrations.

But what has grounded Durham’s work has been its inquiry into the nature of our thinking about nature. A typical painting might feature an ersatz geometric diagram--much like those that filled legions of turn-of-the-century esoteric tracts--etched into the sky above the trees. Instead of illustrating something like the order of the universe or the stages of cosmic evolution, however, the displaced and altogether illegible diagram illustrates the desire to connect the material world to something more profound, more complex, more secretive.

Here, Durham exploits the allure of science, occult doctrine and conceptual art, too. In new work at Hunsaker/Schlesinger Gallery, he backs away from the conceptual program and steps into the realm of pure romance. His trepidation is understandable, but his mistake is that he lets it show.

The centerpiece of the exhibition is a trio of landscapes that read as variations on a theme: an array of trees seen as if through a pair of golden-, purple- or blue-tinted glasses. These are homages to nature’s glorious moodiness, and stripped of the abstruse signs and symbols that structured the earlier works, they look very much like traditional landscapes.

Yet Durham isn’t ready to banish the mathematic/scientific/alchemical forms entirely. These appear in a series of small drawings on gold leaf, collectively titled “Steiner’s Dream” (a reference to the turn-of-the-century mystic and founder of Anthroposophy with whom Durham has long been fascinated). Untethered to any image, however, they are seductive but vacant conceits.

Equally ineffective are three paintings in which a massive gold leaf floats above a dark landscape--an apparition more absurd than poetic. These paintings refer to three sculptures that are also inappropriately funny--gold-leaf-covered globes with gold-leaf-covered leaves bursting out of them.

At once too literal and too mystical, these objects crave the emotional distance that once allowed Durham to engage complex ideas. They are symptomatic of the great difficulty of moving ahead at mid-career, whatever the direction.

* Hunsaker/Schlesinger Fine Art, 2525 Michigan Ave., T3, Santa Monica, (310) 828-1133, through July 15. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Cool Ambiguity: Doug Ischar is a Chicago-based, multimedia installation artist. Such a ponderous description might imply a ponderous brand of practice. In fact, Ischar’s work at Jan Kesner Gallery--which invokes, parodies and mourns constructions of male homosexuality--is not so simply explained.

Ischar cultivates ambiguity without hankering after poetry. He goes for humor, though his style is cool rather than ribald. One could describe his art as minimal--even defiantly so, as political art so often tends in the opposite direction.

His titles are certainly concise. “Hound” consists of a videotaped image of a cat whose eyes have been concealed behind a field of rapidly moving pixels--as if to protect the animal’s identity from those who might too hastily brand him or her a criminal. The piece evokes the absurdity of the media’s relentless fabrication of outlaw sexual persona.

“Lapse” plays off of the contagious nature of voyeurism, and mocks the suspicions it tends to generate. It features a tiny looped image of a man’s face, projected onto a belt buckle. The man turns his head to the side at two-second intervals, and while it is impossible to ascertain the context, one reads the image (inevitably) as sexual, as one reads uncontainable sexuality (inevitably) as the leitmotif of gay male identity.

Ischar troubles the fictions that ground such “inevitability.” Yet he is never absolute about anything, addressing the self-imposed conformity of gay culture while railing against the many stereotypes that plague it.

* Jan Kesner Gallery, 164 N. La Brea, (213) 938-6834, through Saturday. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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In the Woods: In Brian Smith’s small watercolors at ACME, little girls frolic with pink elephants, play with deer, or pose in front of their candy-colored castle--a gaggle of underdressed, under-aged babes in a thicket of happy-looking woods.

If Smith were a recent master of fine arts graduate instead of an English teacher untrained in art, one might dismiss his blissfully saccharine paintings as just too knowing.

Perfectly timed to cash in on the Florine Stettheimer revival (a retrospective of her wildly eccentric paintings will take place at New York’s Whitney Museum this fall), and slyly evocative of Puvis de Chavannes’ bland Symbolist reveries, these fey confections also resonate with a certain, much-hyped strain of contemporary practice: Rita Ackermann’s weird paintings of syringe-wielding waifs, Lily van der Stokker’s cultivated, rainbow-hued vapidity, and Vanessa Beecroft’s narcissistic performances, in which a slew of young women are dressed up to perfectly resemble one another as cookie-cutter little girls.

But assuming the position doesn’t mean one knows how to play the game--or even whether one realizes that there is a game involved. Smith’s retrograde sexual politics are dazzlingly unconcealed: Phallic tree trunks encircle his nymphets at every turn and irony is nowhere in the offing. Yet Smith’s naivete works to his advantage. His work is sincere, which is not to say that it is innocent. It is, however, uncommon. The icing on the cake is the wooden castle the artist constructed, and then painted shades of tangerine, cotton-candy and lime. It is not three-dimensional, but pure facade--as thin as the fantasies upon which it is constructed.

* ACME Gallery, 1800 B Berkeley St., Santa Monica, (310) 264-5818, through July 29. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Group Nonsense: At Dan Bernier Gallery, a group show featuring the work of Ginny Bishton, James Buss and Chris Pate makes rigorous nonsense. Here, rigid systems, explicit sets of parameters and tightly circumscribed lists of materials result in art that is fluid, unresolved and/or jacked up into sensory overdrive.

Pate’s “Love Device #10” is a weirdly elaborate structure made up of descending shelves, glass and mirrored panels and a base of shag carpeting. During the run of the show, it will have 288 jars of pale-toned paint--stacked in the adjacent “Love Device Mobile Supply Unit”--drizzled down its front with appropriate ceremony. The whole thing defies its presumable logic and looks like an explosion at a marshmallow sauce factory.

The suggestive edibleness of Pate’s concoction becomes yet more suggestive in Bishton’s collage of lists of ingredients of loaves of bread she will never need to bake, because she can already taste and smell them. Though her piece is entirely conceptual, so, too, can we taste and smell them--as readily as we can feel the feathery edges of the patched-together bits of scrap paper upon which her recipes are enumerated.

Quite a bit like a constellation of culinary proofs, this piece is complemented by Bishton’s wonderfully obsessive drawings, which consist of parallel lines of richly colored paint, which are agglomerated into unwieldy, but weighty shapes whose immediate gestalt belies their piecemeal nature.

Buss makes paintings that masquerade as sculptures--and/or vice versa. Cast from industrial materials like resin, paint and fix-all, these works are poised on high tables, and are distinguished by their beautiful, highly textured surfaces. Some are deeply abraded, others bear the silky finish of glass, yet others seem to be decomposing before our eyes. Though the work’s layered information and aesthetic of unpredictability links it to the art of both Bishton and Pater, its lyricism is drowned out by the insistently eccentric pragmatics that dominate here.

* Dan Bernier Gallery, 3026 1/2 Nebraska Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 264-4882, through July 16. Closed Sundays and Mondays.