Luscious Works Make Use of Formal Trickery

Jacci Den Hartog’s new work at Christopher Grimes Gallery is so eccentric that at first (and maybe even finally) it’s impossible to place. Wall-mounted sculptures that mimic Asian landscape paintings--snow-covered mountains covered in mist or rocky outcroppings drenched in sheets of rain--these polyurethane and plaster concoctions are weird, kitschy and inspired. In the right light, in the right mood, they may even be magnificent.

Den Hartog is adept at formal trickery. She can convincingly transform rubber into something as refined as plum blossom mist, and plaster into snow, shot through with color as if warmed by the sun. But, as for the Chinese painters after whom her work is modeled, the pursuit of likeness--especially when it stops at external resemblance--is not quite the point.

For an ironist, Den Hartog is surprisingly deferential. Like her Asian predecessors, she dedicates herself to articulating a space--if not a spiritual one, then at least a contemplative one, where oppositions peaceably co-exist and all manner of illogics prevails. Here, philosophy meets plastic, decoration solicits meditation, Baroque illusionism surrenders to Rocco preciousness, and most obviously, three dimensions wryly conjure two.

Occasionally, Den Hartog lets something--either her politics or her sense of humor--get in the way. Two floor pieces, for example--cast rubber agglomerations of overwrought, Oriental-style bric-a-brac--make no sense at all here. They transform the show’s engagement with Asian culture into something like a “theme,” and devolve all too quickly into commentaries on cultural poaching. They are trite, where the rest of Den Hartog’s work, for all its hit-you-over-the-head lusciousness, is nothing if not complicated.

* Christopher Grimes Gallery, 916 Colorado Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 587-3373, through April 27. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Time Warp: In Jody Zellen’s engaging new work at Richard Heller Gallery, time is warped and text explodes. A 19th century painting salon is filled with post-conceptual language games; the altar of a Gothic cathedral receives the Word; and a gallery in the Hermitage Museum looks like MOCA during the recent John Cage show.

Zellen works with found photographs and prints of the traditional spaces of visual display (the church, the opera house, the salon), refashioning them so that every frame, archway or open space is evacuated to make room for bits and pieces of language. These fateful words, disembodied letters and indecipherable fragments of type register the contemporary moment, where information itself--incessant and unavoidable--is deafening.

Zellen’s work, more than ever, looks like the result of digital image processing. In fact, it is, as always, collaged of various photocopied fragments, which are layered, photographed and mechanically printed. There is something perverse in lingering over obsolete photochemical techniques in this era of electronic ubiquity.

And yet there is a certain logic as Zellen’s imagery converges on the antique and the anachronistic. Though the work may appear distant, it is actually quite nostalgic, whether by accident or design.

* Richard Heller Gallery, 2525 Michigan Ave., B-5, Santa Monica, (310) 453-9191, through April 20. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

A Softer Tone: Sue Williams’ subject matter has long been shamelessly incendiary: wife-beating, spousal rape, incest, child abuse. In new paintings at Regen Projects, she softens her tone, placing politics at a remove.

Scrawled words enumerating this or that autobiographical horror are banished, and even the body, with its stick-like arms, spread legs and woeful slump, is occasionally concealed behind the seductive language of color and gesture. So who could have imagined that Williams would aspire to become Helen Frankenthaler?

That may be overstating it a bit, but the shock of seeing Williams transform herself into a formalist is estimable. What’s more shocking, however, is the extent to which she transforms formalism in the process, investing some of its more sacred tropes with an emotional high and an erotic charge.

Several of the larger works are color-field paintings marked in odd places with lines or curves that suggest body parts--arms, legs, torsos. These ghostly, corporeal presences cue us to read the rudely applied paint that engulfs them as stains or emissions, and the violent swaths of color that punctuate them as acts begun suddenly or interrupted prematurely.

The smaller works--covered with legions of tiny black figures displaying their genitals or engaged in sex--play out Abstract Expressionism’s fascination with all-over patterns, but with a naughty, Williams-style twist. Elsewhere, excruciating fine black lines recast Gorky’s linear arabesques, and Twombly-like smudges, appearing at the edges of things, become doubly metaphorical.

Williams’ investigation of modern painting is not methodical nor is it intellectualized. It is haphazard and instinctual, part of what is sure to be a slow process of reinvention. Indeed, in the best piece in the show, Williams has already reinvented the color red, demonstrating how, detached from form, it can feel sore, raw and jubilant all at once.

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

The New Looks Old: From John Rose’s spiraling wooden assemblage to Ewerdt Hilgemann’s collapsing steel boxes, “Structuralism,” a large group show at Boritzer/Gray Hamano Gallery, is filled with new work that looks old.

Here are recycled bits of Vladimir Tatlin, watered-down readings of Naum Gabo, rehashes of Barbara Hepworth, shades of Donald Judd and domesticized approximations of David Smith. When this sort of thing is done self-consciously, we call it postmodern; when it isn’t, we tend not to pay attention. Why start now?

The claim is that the works in this show are not academic exercises (as they appear to be), but that they constitute a movement of sorts--something akin to Constructivism, with its interest in space, motion and materiality, albeit purged of the utopian politics.

While the artists in “Structuralism” may indeed have given up on the notion of coherent systems and organizing principles, this doesn’t make what they are doing new. Nor does the label under which they have been grouped make any sense, considering that it was colonized by literary studies more than 20 years ago.

In the absence of a broader discourse that might contextualize this title and this work, “Structuralism” goes nowhere. In fact, it does a disservice to an artist like Matthew Furmanski, whose techno-fetishistic sculptures would have looked interesting anywhere else but here.

* Boritzer/Gray/Hamano Gallery, 2525 Michigan Ave., D-4, Santa Monica, (310) 315-9502, through May 4. Closed Sundays and Mondays.