ART REVIEWS : Style Over Substance in ‘Beyond the Idea’

The best thing about “Painting Beyond the Idea,” a 13-artist exhibition at Manny Silverman Gallery, is that its odd roster of L.A.-based painters reads like an impossible laundry list.

Your mind has to make giant leaps to imagine what a magisterial abstraction by John M. Miller is doing next to a cornball pastiche by David Lloyd; or what Lari Pittman’s scintillating picture of manic hermaphrodites is doing in the same show as Leonard Seagal’s rank dismissal of visual impact, titled “Blah, Blah, Blah.”

The worst thing about the exhibition, guest-organized by art dealer Bennett Roberts, is that it looks coherent. Your eye glides all too easily around the carefully installed main gallery, slipping over fundamental differences in concept, approach and intention among Pauline Stella Sanchez’s luminous, sculpted image; Lucas Reiner’s slight, fading poetry; Michelle Fierro’s collaged wads of pigment and Ed Moses’ lyrical smears of acrylic.

Surprisingly, Roberts’ demonstration that painting is alive and well in Los Angeles celebrates style over substance. Tasteful design is all that unites its diverse works, linking Sabina Ott’s and John Millei’s aggressively improper compositions to Dennis Hollingsworth’s and Noel O’Malley’s glib, abstract exercises. Requiring more time to be seen, Maxwell Hendler’s quietly gorgeous monochromes almost get lost in the shuffle.

Part of the problem with debates about painting’s vitality is that they’re inherently defensive. Intended as rebuttals to the stale charge that painting is dead, these arguments lock proponents of painting in a conservative position, battling for painting-in-general and forgetting that, like everything else, it is made up of particulars, some good and some bad.

A related problem lies in the exhibition’s venue. The Manny Silverman Gallery is one of the only galleries in Los Angeles to consistently present a historically based program, showing in-depth surveys of the New York School and its offshoots. It’s disappointing that no links between these historical precedents and contemporary L.A. painting are proposed. Instead, the history of painting is invoked as an empty abstraction, an ill-defined shadow lacking specificity and impact.

* Manny Silverman Gallery, 619 N. Almont Drive, West Hollywood, (310) 659-8256, through Oct. 28. Closed Sunday and Monday.

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Strange Mix: At G. Ray Hawkins Gallery, a curious survey of 38 photographs by Paul Outerbridge (1896-1959) divides neatly in two. Predominantly composed of formal portraits, soft-focused nudes and crystalline still lifes, the exhibition’s staid demeanor (meant to signify serious artistic purpose) is thrown off-kilter by 12 vintage carbro-color prints.

Among works deeply indebted to the formalist rigor of Modernist photography, Outerbridge’s color prints stand out like floozies at a church picnic. One glistening image depicts an elaborately set table in a home overloaded with a stylistic mish-mash of furniture and an enormous Christmas tree laden with swanky decorations. This dizzying print manifests a camp sensibility, well ahead of its time.

An outlandish advertisement for coffee shows two young couples sipping from silver cups in a cozy den whose walls are covered with swords, guns and the taxidermied heads of an antelope and a zebra. Depicting an overkill of good taste, Outerbridge’s photo seems more like mockery than endorsement, though today advertisements do both simultaneously.

In another picture, a bar is decorated like a storybook circus, suggesting a connection between adult vices and childish fantasies. A shot of a house under construction makes the entire neighborhood look fake, like a toy train set.

Extravagantly theatrical and splendidly artificial, Outerbridge’s color photos shatter the Modernist conventions of his black-and-white prints. Extreme in their fakery, his color pictures paradoxically tell the truth about contemporary experience. In contrast, Outerbridge’s black-and-white works seem strangely outdated, as if nostalgic for simpler times.

* G. Ray Hawkins Gallery, 908 Colorado Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 394-5558, through Oct. 28. Closed Sunday and Monday.

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The Dark Side: The art world’s rediscovery of Robert Overby (1935-1993) continues with an impressive exhibition of cast sculptures from the early 1970s at Burnett Miller Gallery. Not as wide-ranging as last year’s stunning, introductory survey at Sue Spaid Fine Art, the new installation of this under-recognized, L.A.-based artist’s work emphasizes its dark, funereal side.

Rubbery casts of rough, wooden doors and of the hallway walls of an old, burned-out hotel exude an aura of tragedy. Like death masks for long-gone buildings, Overby’s fragile reliefs record the presence of structures no longer with us.

To make these pieces that now hang loosely from the gallery walls, the artist spread a gooey coat of latex over doors, frames, walls and windows. He then peeled off the skin-like layer, creating a cast of every nook and cranny of the objects covered by the latex. In the process, bits of paint, slivers of wood and other detritus were often pulled off and embedded in his reliefs.

Evoking the bittersweet twang of melancholy, Overby’s works also trigger a sense of crime-scene intrigue. Looking at these incredibly detailed pieces--the largest measures more than 9-by-31 feet--has the feel of being in a crime lab, examining mural-size fingerprints for evidence of wrongdoing.

The power of Overby’s art resides in its unwillingness to let viewers point fingers at individual culprits, instead suggesting that everyone, or no one, is responsible for the destruction chronicled by his insistently anonymous sculptures. A touch of Pompeii’s sad grandeur suffuses these poignant pieces. Like the ancient city, they trace fate’s intervention in everyday experience.

* Burnett Miller Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 315-9961, through Nov. 4. Closed Sunday and Monday.