The Writing’s on the Wall : Gary Simmons’ blackboard wall works dealing with race and memory are elegant proof that tough issues don’t always have to be tackled in a shrill or heavy-handed manner.

It’s virtually impossible for a young artist to distinguish himself at the Whitney Biennial, the controversy-riddled, biyearly survey of what’s hot, shocking and trendy in the American art world. Yet two years ago, New York-based artist Gary Simmons stood out in the sprawling exhibition at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art because his work embraced such unfashionable ideas as beauty, nuance and ambiguity.

At that moment, art that wore its political intentions on its sleeve was all the rage, making for a shrill, preachy show in which viewers were endlessly lectured by tedious moralists who had no clue of how they might make their progressive political messages appeal to anyone outside a captive audience of hapless graduate students. Art critics everywhere were enraged.

Amid all this clamor stood Simmons’ wall drawings--they would have stood out anyway because they looked so good--yet they had the double edge of being seductive and haunting without abandoning the difficult social issues of the exhibition’s theme.

An African American artist, the 31-year-old Simmons explored issues of racism and memory in furiously elegant images, demonstrating that tough subjects and visual satisfaction are not mutually exclusive--and that, at best, they can work together to increase art’s power.

Since the 1993 Whitney Biennial, Simmons’ work has grown in scale and complexity. It has been included in numerous international exhibitions, including an important show at the Drawing Center in New York. It’s also beginning to attract commentary from across the spectrum.

On Saturday, Simmons’ newest, biggest and most ambitious exhibition will open at the Lannan Foundation in western Los Angeles, between Marina del Rey and the airport. This major show, occupying the entire main gallery, consists of five “Erasure Drawings,” most measuring more than 15 feet tall and one reaching 50 feet in length.

Discussing his ghostly graffiti in an interview in the Lannan’s offices, the affable, soft-spoken artist chooses his words carefully, never fussing over particular phrases but deeply concerned to convey his thoughts as clearly as possible. At once casual and serious, Simmons moves comfortably from personal impressions to intellectual analysis--and back again.

“The Lannan show is special,” he says, “because until now I’ve never put so many different wall drawings in one room. I know it sounds sort of sappy, but in the past I’d walk into a gallery and let the space almost tell me what to do with it. I did that to a certain extent at the Lannan, with the largest image, for example. But mostly I tried to coordinate the drawings so they’d be connected but not form any sort of heavy-handed narrative.”

Drawn in white chalk on black slate-coated walls--then rubbed and smudged by the artist’s bare hands and arms--Simmons’ partially erased pictures resemble lessons written on schoolroom blackboards but function like nothing you learned in school.

Simmons, who was born in New York City to parents who had immigrated from Barbados in the 1950s, was shocked when his family moved out of the urban tumult he loved to suburbia in Rockland County, New York, just across the Hudson River from the city. His father, who ran a successful and highly respected printing company that published fine-art photography books by Ansel Adams and Garry Winogrand, wanted to ensure that his son and daughter got the best possible educations.

As a teen, Simmons found his new school and neighborhood to be less than ideal--and a lot less interesting than the racially mixed neighborhoods where he had hung out as a kid in the city. Out of place in his bland, stifling surroundings, he fought constantly with his classmates.

A keen observer even then, Simmons believed that his fights were the result of two circumstances: that he was black and that he was from the big city. “More than anything else,” he says, “my experiences in high school shaped the way I see things.” The sting of prejudice was inextricably linked to education, to the sheltered environments in which kids are led to see things one way rather than another.

As soon as he graduated from high school, Simmons moved to Brooklyn. That fall he happily enrolled at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan. Upon graduation, Simmons attended the prestigious Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine before moving to Los Angeles, where he went to graduate school at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia. Both CalArts and its setting reminded him of his suburban high school. He commuted from downtown L.A., and left the West Coast right after graduating in 1989 to move back to Brooklyn.

At the Lannan, Simmons’ five drawings depict an empty ballroom, an abandoned shipwreck, a vacant throne, a starry sky and dozens of spears sailing through the air. The largest image, and the first one seen, is a grand ballroom with sweeping staircases, glorious columns and a monstrous chandelier.

“Part of the reason I decided to do a ballroom was because entering the Lannan’s main gallery is breathtaking,” he says. “I wanted to draw you into that airy space with the gorgeous floor in the most elegant way possible. Also, ballrooms quiver with sexual energy. They’re formal, showy and seductive, designed for social rituals in which people pair off with one another.

“To play with the markers within that kind of structure is interesting because it throws off all the things you take for granted within the space. On first glance the chandelier looks attractive and lavish, but as you look more closely you discover that it’s a group of nooses.”

Inspired by such classics of animation as “Dumbo” and “Bosko and the Pirates,” Simmons’ larger-than-life-size images are never didactic or authoritarian. They refrain from presenting pat answers to the difficult questions they want us to ask ourselves and instead try to get viewers personally involved with their ambiguous, multilayered narratives.

“These big wall drawings,” Simmons explains, “go back to a trained Hollywood cockatoo I used in a 1991 Santa Monica exhibition [at the now-closed Roy Boyd Gallery]. Until then, I had never drawn directly on the wall, only on medium-size sheets of paper.”

That installation (titled “Polly wanna?”) consisted of a gorgeous white bird perched on a podium with a microphone in a classroom-like setting, complete with blackboard and clock.

“What I loved about that piece,” Simmons recalls, “had nothing to do with what I originally planned. The cockatoo never sat still: It flapped its wings, twisted, turned, squawked and frantically flew around the gallery, leaving droppings everywhere. So rather than having a static piece mocking schoolroom education, I had out-of-control activity.

“I was fascinated by the bird’s movements against the backdrop of the blackboard and decided that I wanted to get the traces of that motion into my art on a much larger scale than was possible with the works on paper. So I stopped using real blackboards and started drawing right on the walls.”

At CalArts his interest in early-childhood education led him to study cartoons as one type of underhanded, out-of-classroom instruction. With vivid memories of characters representing racist stereotypes, like the shucking and jiving crows in “Dumbo,” the artist was struck by his white classmates’ inability to remember the crows, much less to see what they represented: “I wondered, as a black child, do different images from film stick in your head? And I decided that yes, there is some sort of racial composition here.”

“There are unbelievably racist scenes, like a frog tap-dancing and happily singing in a stereotypically black voice as he’s getting lynched. But some of these sequences are, in a sense, very funny. They’re hysterical. That’s what draws me to cartoons. Because they’re multilayered, they allow you to laugh at really horrible situations. They are some of the most violent things going. They may look simple, but they’re really complicated.”

Simmons captures this complexity in his wall drawings, often turning racial stereotypes inside out. Although the figures in his early images closely resemble the original characters they were drawn from, his recent works are more generalized, sometimes consisting only of cartoon backgrounds or an emotionally charged object or two. He believes that “this tends to free viewers from being anchored in one racial construction.” It sets the stage to imaginatively enter the picture from different points of view.

For example, bags of cookies appear in many of Simmons’ drawings. He said that this motif derives from “Bosko and the Pirates,” a cartoon that always began with a little black boy getting a bag of cookies from his mother, along with instructions to deliver them to his grandmother. Each story recounts Bosko’s imaginary adventures as he eludes pirates, menacing frogs and other fantastic threats on the way to his grandmother’s house.

For Simmons, “The cookies have a strange, sexual identity. This poor kid is always protecting his goodies, or risking emasculation, from pirates and frogs representing African Americans. Bosko was on guard from the minute he got the goods from his mother to the moment he passed them on to her mother.”

Among other things, Bosko is the male version of Little Red Riding Hood. For its part, the bag of cookies represents economic value, a cherished family gift, an important missive or anything highly valued by an individual trapped in hostile, threatening surroundings.

Shifting to a softer tone, Simmons confesses, “I really love looking at beautiful objects--even if they demand that I confront difficult issues. With art, why else would a viewer be compelled to deal with ugly, troublesome, often painful issues?”

Gaining momentum, he continues: “I am equally influenced by popular culture and traditional paintings and sculpture. Gerhard Richter has affected how I look at images. The way Cindy Sherman puts things together inspires me. Jackie Windsor is another huge influence, but so are the New York Knicks.

“I try to build a lot of layers into my works, so you can enter them on many different levels. I don’t want to close my drawings off, to say they’re only about one issue. That’s sanctimonious and short-sighted. Art doesn’t work that way.”

* “Gary Simmons: Erasure Drawings,” Lannan Foundation, 5401 McConnell Ave. Saturday through Jan. 7. Tuesdays-Sundays, 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Admission is free. (310) 306-1004.