ART REVIEWS : Johnson’s Bittersweet Prints: Nostalgic for Nostalgia

The razor sharpness that has given Larry Johnson’s slick, Ektacolor prints their edge for almost 10 years goes dull in his new exhibition at Margo Leavin Gallery. Missing from these large, sumptuously colored pictures is the tension between urgency and restraint that fueled his earlier work.

In place of that nervous edginess, in which desperation and the willingness to maintain a stiff upper lip were held in precarious balance, a looser, more melancholic meditation on time’s inevitable passage takes sketchy shape.

One handsome print, which simply presents the dates “1950-1959,” encapsulates the show’s bittersweet feel of being born too late. Squeezed into a frame more than twice as tall as it is wide, these huge, compressed numerals read like the dates on a gravestone of a 9-year-old.

Only upon reading the title, “The Difference Between Forty-five and Thirty-six,” and knowing something of Johnson’s biography (he was born in 1959), does it become clear that this piece invites viewers to ponder an accident of fate, to speculate about how Johnson’s art might be different if he belonged to an earlier generation.

The rest of the show’s 11 images elaborate upon time’s transformative power. Two prints suggest that since history repeats itself, a decade doesn’t make much difference: “Highlights of 1995” shows newspaper headlines that could have come from the 1950s or the 1990s; and “Peter Lawford” proposes that Arnold Schwarzenegger’s career mirrors that of Lawford, an actor from the 1950s and 1960s with similar ties to the same prominent political family.

Referring to Madonna’s fleeting fame, John Belushi’s early death and the 1970s fads of “beefalo” and “jojoba chutney,” three of Johnson’s best-looking prints recapitulate Warhol’s assertion that invisibility, in an image-saturated world, is tantamount to death.

As a whole, Johnson’s exhibition is nostalgic for nostalgia. Too generalized and imprecise to have the swift, supple kick that has been a trademark of his art, these new works begin to register the aging--if not the maturation--of a sly style. Where this time-consuming process takes Johnson’s touchy, once volatile work remains to be seen.

* Margo Leavin Gallery, 812 N. Robertson Blvd., (310) 273-0603, through Jan. 13. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Powerful Thrills: If you give them a chance, Sam Reveles’ powerful paintings give you a thrill a minute. If this pace sounds as if it’s too slow for your contemporary, rapid-fire, image-saturated eyes, just try looking at one of these impressive abstractions at Regen Projects for as long as you’d watch an MTV video you’ve never seen.

More happens at once--and resonates much more intensely in your memory--when you look at a painting by Reveles than when you view almost any big-budget production. With whiplash immediacy, standard economies of scale are rendered obsolete by these five magisterial abstractions.

Titled “Private Adoration,” Reveles’ best painting makes you feel that you’re flying, like Jonathan Livingston Seagull--only at “Star Trek’s” warp-speed--through a colorful, suddenly immaterialized text filled with page after page of imaginary, larger-than-life-size Arabic inscribed in swirling blue flourishes.

Behind these nonsensical, full-wristed inscriptions, which appear to leap from the surface of the canvas, lie patterns and palettes the artist borrowed from religious images from Renaissance Italy. These historical referents resemble bold cartoons, made up of lively, striped patterns in loud, hot colors. They serve as the underpainting on top of which Reveles does his original work.

All of his paintings consist of wild tangles of line, sometimes rubbed into cloudy, vaporous smears and at other times laid down with freewheeling ease. Paint is always applied very thinly, keeping the surface free of angst-laden lumps. The palette is matte and usually wacky.

It’s rare to find sheer excitement in abstract paintings, and Reveles delivers this experience with breathtaking aplomb. His fourth solo show in as many years is a joy to behold.

* Regen Projects, 629 N. Almont Drive, (310) 276-5424, through Jan. 20. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Rough and Tumble: Bill Jensen’s paintings at Patricia Faure Gallery are some of the biggest little paintings of recent memory. Five solid, honest canvases, whose large scale is belied by their modest size, are also some of the best works the 50-year-old, New York-based artist has made during his long and steady (some would say plodding) career.

In the past, Jensen’s dense, compacted abstractions, stubbornly rooted in the early 20th century work of Albert Pinkham Ryder, Marsden Hartley and Arthur Dove, won him a reputation as an artist’s artist, a painter whose devotion to and facility with the medium enthralled other painters, but failed to attract the attention of a wider audience.

These new paintings, all made this year, are more likely to appeal to more people, while still being supported by the loyal core of painters who have long been drawn to Jensen’s quasi-organic abstractions. Looser, more expansive and with an increasingly keyed-up palette, the new works feel less claustrophobic or controlled than previous paintings, more Jensen’s own than reverential riffs on the romantic works of his heroes.

None of Jensen’s paintings resembles another. Spread throughout three large, sky-lit galleries, each image has plenty of breathing room. As a group, these rough-and-tumble canvases have the presence of a loose confederation of misfits, of individuals too strong-willed to band together in anything like civil society.

The fierce, anti-social air breathed by outlaws blows through Jensen’s abstract landscapes, bringing vigor to a myth that’s usually dismissed as being outdated but feels profoundly contemporary in front of these intense, surprisingly generous paintings.

* Patricia Faure Gallery, 2525 Michigan Ave., Bergamot Station, B7, Santa Monica, (310) 449-1479, through Jan. 13. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Solitary Pleasures?: Like pornography, John Sonsini’s nudes begin by grabbing your eyeballs. But almost as quickly, these thickly built-up oils on canvas at Dan Bernier Gallery turn the conventions on which pornography is based inside-out, reversing and complicating the standard relationship between viewer and viewed.

After a moment, you get the impression that the trim, muscular men posing in Sonsini’s larger-than-life-size images are not there to trigger your solitary pleasures so much as you’re there to satisfy their peculiar, inarticulate needs. In the end, the artist’s depictions of scantily clad beefcake elicit responses more common to art than to porn.

If anything distinguishes these two types of representation, it is that the latter cultivates involuntary, all-or-nothing responses in which self-consciousness is momentarily eliminated, while the former fosters a more ambiguous relationship, in which self-reflection plays a significant role.

Bedecked with ribbons, hats and grass skirts, Sonsini’s nudes look you straight in the eye, almost always with far-away, come-hither gazes that emphasize their vulnerability. Rather than playing out pat fantasies of submission, these figures seem to plead for your sympathetic interaction.

Like all types of art, Sonsini’s paintings demand to be apprehended by means of a complex give-and-take. In this indeterminate exchange, viewer and viewed meet at a halfway point that’s never predetermined but must be discovered as one goes along.

* Dan Bernier Gallery, 3026 1/2 Nebraska Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 264-4882, through Jan. 13. Closed Sundays and Mondays.