Art Reivews : ‘Viva Los Angeles’ Tries to Update Ensor’s Masterpiece

“Viva Los Angeles,” James Strombotne’s exhibition at Sherry Frumkin Gallery, is based on James Ensor’s magnificent 1888 painting “Christ’s Entry Into Brussels in 1889,” a searing portrayal of the death of spirituality in the modern city. In Ensor’s massive painting, a tiny Christ enters the city on the back of a donkey, lost amid the reveling grotesques, all of them past redemption.

Strombotne, in a misguided attempt to update a work of art that needs no updating, takes on L.A. circa 1996. In the process, he renders relevance completely irrelevant.

Strombotne emulates Ensor’s scale and composition in a whole slew of paintings that seem more like outtakes than fully realized images. Instead of Ensor’s doomed freaks, however, he stuffs the canvases full of students in sweatshirts, jubilant nudes, Mickey Mouses and assorted others, out having a good time.

Banners fly in different languages and storefronts offer a variety of ethnic cuisines, from pizza to barbecue. Despite the occasional Satan and gangbanger, this reads more as a celebration of the diversity of Los Angeles than a cautionary tale.

Strombotne’s cartoon-like style falls flat, neither quite naive nor convincingly ironic. So does his palette, which strives toward the dystopian but merely looks uninspired. The best this exhibition can do is prompt the viewer to travel a few more miles to the west to see Ensor’s original, housed in the collection of the J. Paul Getty Museum.

* Sherry Frumkin Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 453-1850, through March 23. Closed Sunday and Monday.

Mischievous Revenge: It’s tempting to read Didi Dunphy’s new works at Dan Bernier Gallery solely in terms of critique. Her tiny embroideries mimic Modernist abstractions, such as stripe paintings a la Ellsworth Kelly, Agnes Martin-style pastel bands and Piet Mondrian’s jazzy geometries.

If Modernism emblematizes a swollen male ego, these pieces seem to want to cut it down to size. Yet to reduce the gesture to aesthetic revenge is to miss the finer points of the artist’s wit, which hinges both on a sense of mischief and a taste for masochism.

One of my favorites is a rainbow-colored composition of triangles and circles that recalls Adolph Gottlieb’s pictographs, a schoolgirl’s sampler and a digitized landscape. Another, a wildly exuberant checkerboard, reminded me less of any particular geometric abstraction than of artist Sherrie Levine’s take on the generic type.

Dunphy’s method of second-generation appropriation is complex, at once a tautology, a hyperbole and a confutation of Postmodernism’s supposed anomie. The work wears its labor-intense quality on its sleeve, and its pride--its vanity, even--is most becoming.

* Dan Bernier Gallery, 3026 1/2 Nebraska Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 264-4882, through March 23. Closed Sunday and Monday.