Smelling a ‘Rat’ in the Motives of Corporate America

Walking into Llyn Foulkes’ exhibition at Patricia Faure Gallery feels like stepping into a giant time capsule that was buried somewhere in mid-America in the 1950s. The musty claustrophobia embodied by the artist’s scathing, trompe l’oeil images is shot through with the same absolute, ill-grounded distinction between right and wrong that once fanned the flames of McCarthyism and other desperate attempts to “clean up the country” by returning it to a past that never existed.

Bitterness and resentment are the sentiments that drive Foulkes’ monomaniacal show. Titled “The Legend of Mickey Rat,” its 12 paintings focus on a cartoon that might be the poor cousin or evil twin of the cheery rodent whose image has come to represent Disneyland, Disney movies and Disney marketing--a triumvirate of commercial enterprises the artist seems to blame for ruining the nation.

Rather than serving up playful escapism while teaching children simple lessons about good citizenship, Foulkes’ character takes adult viewers on a grim tour of society’s ugly underbelly. “School Days” is a mixed-media image of Mickey Rat wandering among garbage and carcasses in a barren landscape. With a child’s tiny chair placed before it, the painted relief bluntly asserts that innocent kids are routinely brainwashed by evil corporations.

The effects of this trauma regularly reappear in the rest of Foulkes’ three-dimensional pictures. In “Mickey and Me,” the smiling cartoon climbs out of a hole in the artist’s head. In four others, Mickey claws his way out of Walt Disney’s eye socket, emerges from the bloodied heads of a pair of anonymous men and pops through a hole burned in a flag pasted to a chalkboard.

Foulkes’ Mickey also wanders through desolate Western landscapes almost lunar in their rocky inhospitality. In one, he sits on the edge of an unpopulated canyon marred by a “For Sale” sign. In another, he perches on a fence post and regards a pair of Native Americans in traditional clothing, who look more like cigar store statues than living individuals.

The best that can be said of Foulkes’ self-righteous flashbacks to a fantasized past is that they bring a respect for craftsmanship back to contemporary art. However, the skill with which these masterfully crafted works fuse found objects and painted illusions fails to save them from being tiresome rehashes of a bygone era’s hypocritical moralism.

* Patricia Faure Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 449-1479, through July 6. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Famous Faces: Joseph Santarromana’s computer-generated self-portraits at Newspace Gallery make fun of the idea that contemporary art provides a useful arena in which one’s sense of self can be shored up. Although many academics and would-be activists believe that works of art clearly identify individuals in terms of the groups we already belong to, Santarromana’s mischievous images demonstrate that art only works when it unsettles identities.

The centerpiece of Santarromana’s third solo show is a series of six digitized prints that depict the hybridized offspring of images of his face and the faces of six figures from popular culture.

Fused with Mad magazine’s Alfred E. Neumann, Santarromana looks adorable and slightly devilish, like a chubby prankster capable of turning against you in a minute. Morphed with Homer Simpson, he appears to be a chimp with a mind of its own. The sweetest picture is of the artist as Disney’s Pocahontas: Surprisingly human in its details, this portrait reveals the power childhood entertainment still holds for adults.

Santarromana’s three other portraits--fused with the figurehead for Big Boy restaurants, the police sketch of the Unabomber suspect and Warhol’s photo-silkscreen of Marilyn Monroe--are less captivating. They have the presence of two-dimensional pictures rather than the hotblooded feel of animated beings.

Even less engaging are the artist’s smaller inkjet prints, formed by fusing family snapshots. Only identifiable by their titles, these distorted abstractions are too conceptual to trigger embodied responses. They’re not nearly as loaded as Santarromana’s more playful works, in which his identity begins to slip away from itself so that yours, too, might become a fleeting and queasy collision between past influences and future mutations.

* Newspace Gallery, 5241 Melrose Ave., (213) 469-9353, through June 29. Closed Sundays and Mondays.