ART REVIEW : Abstractions That Match Ambitions

It’s rare to see a large painting that looks bigger than it actually is. At Margo Leavin Gallery, Albert Oehlen’s abstract canvases measure seven or eight feet on a side yet command much more space than these dimensions suggest.

Although bigger is not always better, size is not the same as scale: The former can be measured in inches and feet, but the latter has more to do with a work’s emotional impact. In Oehlen’s case, the scale of his rambunctious, intentionally ugly abstractions matches their ambitions.

Their clotted constellations of unctuous, industrial-strength colors have been hastily applied and rubbed thin with turpentine to form fluid stews of oil, enamel and acrylic. These works put their relationship to a viewer ahead of their relationship to their maker.

Despite our tendency to think of abstract paintings as expressions of an artist’s inner, emotional state, there’s nothing expressive about Oehlen’s jam-packed canvases. Their gestures, marks and brush strokes don’t record the bodily movements that brought them into being. Instead, they seem to have been put down perfunctorily, as if the artist was too impatient to worry about compositional niceties, preferring to create awkward, unwieldy fields of energy that have a better chance of grabbing your eyes and sustaining your interest.

To emphasize that his work is impersonal, Oehlen also uses a computer to generate diagrammatic shapes that are silk-screened on canvas and then retouched with a brush. These three black-and-white paintings aren’t as engaging as his multilayered, contradiction-riddled works in color. The computer-generated illustrations abandon rich, murky ambivalence for clarity of purpose, losing what is interesting about Oehlen’s other paintings. As a result, they look smaller than they actually are.

* Margo Leavin Gallery, 812 N. Robertson Blvd., (310) 273-0603, through Aug. 19. Closed Sundays and Mondays.