Art Reviews : Haunting Parables : Russia’s Ilya Kabakov Deftly Uses Storytelling to Engage an Audience

Of the dissident Russian artists who have emerged in the West since the collapse of communism, Moscow’s Ilya Kabakov has been the most significant. His poetic installations and mixed-media works record the difficult contradictions between a temporal body that is restrained and a mind that’s imaginative and free. Trapped between them is the human spirit, achingly conflicted.

Kabakov’s art hasn’t been much seen in Los Angeles, but a new exhibition at Rosamund Felsen Gallery offers a good, occasionally terrific sampling of relatively recent work. Whatever the medium, the artist deftly uses storytelling to engage an audience in haunting modern parables.

“The Glue Escapes” embodies the childlike whimsy that fuels his work. On a large, sign-like, Masonite panel painted white, Kabakov has penned a children’s story about raucous complications caused by the oozing adhesive, complete with an amusing illustration. It looks like an oversize book-page, but the battered white field also recalls Modern art’s old image of idealized purity.

This time, though, life’s sticky situations have intruded. Innocent fantasy, whether of children or artists, becomes a powerful engine for the awful realities of survival.

Narrative also guides the two fine installations, including “I will return on April 12th, 1989 . . . .” The installation, made in 1991, refers to a promised return two years earlier, a moment of epochal transformation in Russian society.

Behind black barriers, a large painting on paper of blue sky punctuated by fluffy clouds is laid out on the floor. Adjacent is a wooden chair, on which a suit of men’s clothing has been neatly folded: Apparently, the artist has disappeared.

Whether he’s escaped, been taken away or miraculously flown free via the heavenly image of open sky created in his art, is anybody’s guess. Whatever, art is what he’s left behind--a legacy of vanished experience. That legacy also serves to describe the medium of installation art, which Kabakov has been instrumental in bringing to prominence.

(Incidentally, April 12, 1989, is the date a notable Russian novelist announced he had discovered the remains, long thought destroyed, of Czar Nicholas II and his family. Whether Kabakov’s piece means to relate to this astounding news is hard to say, but poetically it resounds.)

Kabakov’s work builds on numerous precedents--Chagall’s flying peasants, Malevich’s spiritual abstraction “White on White” (1918), the always powerful tradition of Russian folk tales. He’s re-formed them for our very different world today, and in a manner brilliant for its profound simplicity.

* Rosamund Felsen Gallery, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 828-8488, through Aug. 12. Closed Sundays and Mondays. *

Art With an Appealing Tilt: For several years Roger Herman has been painting in an abstract manner that leans toward the figurative, and a figurative manner that leans toward the abstract. His lush new paintings at Ace Contemporary Exhibitions continue that tilt, but with an appealing twist.

The eight abstractions date from 1994-95. All are big--the largest is composed of four canvases arranged in a grid, reaching 14-by-24 feet--and they are painted as either multicolored vertical stripes, with a loaded brush repeatedly dragged up and down the canvas, or as thick clusters of irregular dots on aqueous fields of color.

The 19 figurative paintings were made this year. Beautifully installed in a series of monastic rooms, each one shows the same, monotonously ordered facade of a modern apartment building. Much smaller than the abstract paintings--the smallest is barely 14-by-11 inches--Herman’s serial images employ odd, often candylike color combinations, such as blue-green-pink or yellow-pink-blue, interrupted by stark shadows. The color feels synthetic and washed out by the blinding light of day.

Herman’s apartment facades devolve into abstract repetitions of form, both gestural and geometric, while his abstractions have the feel of vast, floral landscapes. What’s bizarre is that the highly decorative motifs of both recall the cathedral facades and water gardens of Monet, while their sumptuously empty painterliness is Neo-Expressionist.

“French” paintings painted by a German, they are nonetheless profoundly American in feeling. Herman’s pictures strike a distinctive chord, which speaks to a familiar predicament: Engagement with powerfully sensual knowledge must always be dragged from an unstoppable practical experience of arid bleakness.

* Ace Contemporary Exhibitions, 5514 Wilshire Blvd., (213) 935-4411, through Oct. 31. Closed Sundays and Mondays. *

Stranger in Paradise: Literally and figuratively, Jack Pierson’s “Paradise” is made from scavenged parts. Located outdoors on a bright-blue cinder-block wall across the parking lot from Track 16, its sponsoring gallery at Bergamot Station, the large, illuminated sculpture is composed of individual letters spelling out its title. In flashing bulbs and glowing neon of assorted hues and type styles, Pierson’s assertion of paradise is accented by a big jaunty star.

The parts have been salvaged from commercial signs, of unknown but Vegas-like origin, and reassembled to advertise an all-American dream. The letters, slightly beat-up but still glamorous, are fragments of seductive, distinctly modern exhortations to anonymous passersby.

The come-hither advertising language from which the artist has remade paradise takes full advantage of a familiar quality of assemblage art: A perfumed aura of dreaminess and loss is intrinsic to aged cast-offs. In their new sculptural guise, the lonely aroma of nostalgia resonates against a pale sense of fragile optimism.

Pierson is also known for installations, photographs and drawings. But “Paradise,” which deftly transforms the private poetic reveries typical of assemblage art into a distinctly public form, offers further evidence that his signs comprise his most affecting work.

* Track 16 Gallery, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 264-4678, through Aug . 31. Closed Sundays and Mondays.