Art Reviews : Branching Out : Victor Estrada’s Work at Santa Monica Museum Is Both Inventive, Grim

Victor Estrada’s “Tree of Life” bears decidedly strange fruit. In the rear gallery of the Santa Monica Museum of Art, the monumental sculpture is at once charming, horrific, funny, lively and not a little off-putting--a view of life both inventive and grim.

Like his gargantuan sculpture “Baby/Baby,” the two-headed creature that was among the strongest works in the Museum of Contemporary Art’s notorious 1992 exhibition, “Helter Skelter: L.A. Art in the 1990s,” Estrada’s big “Tree of Life” filters classic subject matter through pop culture forms. The transformation is remarkable.

The Bible records two versions of a tree of life. One is in Eden, its fruit holding the promise of everlasting life; the other is in the heavenly Jerusalem, its leaves capable of healing nations. Estrada’s vivid extrapolation seems capable of granting neither immortality nor therapeutic recovery.

Slathered with white plaster, the trunk of the “Tree of Life” sprouts nose- and ear-like protrusions. With two painted knotholes for eyes, its cartoonish form recalls the goofy but dangerous anthropomorphic trees that threatened Dorothy in the enchanted forest outside Oz.

An architectonic superstructure of 2-by-4s grows from the top, its spreading limbs mingling with the wooden truss-beams of the museum’s ceiling. Suspended from the limbs are eccentric, vaguely organic forms, also made of plaster and boldly painted in solid red, green, black or silver. Thin rubber hoses hang from the deformed fruit, as if the tree were on emergency life-support.

Strands of wire also dangle clusters of small clay forms, some reminiscent of elfin heads. They’re like seed pods promising warped renewal. The room, its walls painted a fluorescent yellow, creates a brightly charged environment for an apocalyptic vision of mutant change and ritual rebirth.

The monumental sculpture also recalls a Mexican folk tradition in which fantastic visions of the tree of life are spectacularly crafted from brightly painted plaster. Although darker and more ominous, Estrada’s version shares with this arte popular a poignant, oddly optimistic point of view. For the fecundity of experience promised by the subject of a tree of life is itself embodied in the creation of such a remarkable sculptural form. Estrada’s may be a “Tree of Life on Life-Support,” but it’s not dead yet.

Also at the museum is “Intra-Venus,” a large exhibition of the harrowing self-portrait photographs and drawings in which the late, New York-based artist Hannah Wilke recorded her extensive chemotherapy treatment for cancer. Unfortunately, the show has no independent curator. It was organized instead by Wilke’s gallery in Manhattan, Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, and sent on tour. This is the second recent show at the Santa Monica Museum to have been commercially organized, and the trend is certainly troubling.

* Santa Monica Museum of Art, 2437 Main St., (310) 399-0433, through Nov. 26. Closed Mondays and Tuesdays. *

Enthusiastic Hybridity: Victor Estrada is also among eight artists whose lithographs are the subject of “LAX-Benito Juarez: Prints by Artists From Mexico City and Los Angeles,” a small but engaging exhibition at the UCLA/Armand Hammer Museum of Art. The 10 prints were produced at El Nopal Press, a lithographic workshop begun in 1990 by L.A. master printer Francesco Siqueiros. The blend of sweetness and sting in a prickly pear ( el nopal ) will tell you something about the work that has been produced there.

Most of the lithographs are modest in scale, if not artistic ambition, with dimensions rarely exceeding one or two feet. Several artists--Eloy Tarcisio, Rocio Maldonado, Daniel J. Martinez and Yreina Cervantez--combine multiple sheets into larger formats.

The subtext of many prints is an enthusiastic hybridity. Pre-Columbian totems mingle with post-Columbian figures, for example, in the earthy images by German Venegas.

The face of Emiliano Zapata sneaks into a television advertisement for Looney Tunes-brand Speedy Gonzales Beef Enchilada TV-dinners in Ruben Ortiz-Torres’ snappy print. A sly mix of high-tech photo-lithography and old-fashioned Populist woodcut, it’s titled “The Revolution Will Be Televised.”

The most luxuriously beautiful print is “Maria de Mexico” by John Valadez, in which a young woman’s face, her eyes shadowed and lips rouged, is framed in an extravagant, colonial Baroque cartouche. The image rises from a fiery pit in the earth and is crowned by a cascade of gemstones.

Like a latter-day St. Theresa swooning in ecstasy, her visage is simultaneously lost in a spiritual trance and abandoned in carnal reverie. This is a prickly pear of a very different order.

* UCLA/Armand Hammer Museum, 10899 Wilshire Blvd., (310) 443-7000, through Jan. 7. Closed Mondays.

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Deconstruction: Carpentry often stands as a simple metaphor for the usefulness of art in Sam Durant’s sculpture, drawings and photographs. His invigorating new work at Blum & Poe Gallery--reached through a sliding glass patio-door the artist has installed at the entrance--employs modern furniture and architectural design to take apart a middle-class fantasy of suburban Utopia.

Photographs of modern chairs unceremoniously tipped over on their sides focus on the marred and banged-up structures that support their stylishly designed seats. An ugly bookshelf, whose ancestry lies in the refined and elegant Eames design carefully framed in a nearby picture, is piled with disheveled magazines and papers that ruin the sublime orderliness promised by Modern art.

Irregularly shaped pieces cut from sheets of laminated wood lean in clusters against a wall. They’re what’s left over when kitchen or bathroom counters are made. Formally reminiscent of sculptures by Cady Noland, these red-white-and-blue or avocado-brown-and-orange assemblages are cast-offs from building the American Dream.

Durant has a knack for making art out of what gets left behind, left out or tossed aside whenever an idealized world is being constructed. The result is work marked by an unusually cheerful sense of ordinariness, and a cool satisfaction with the lively messiness of human experience.

* Blum & Poe Gallery, 2042 Broadway, Santa Monica, (310) 453-8311, through Nov. 22. Closed Sundays and Mondays.