Bringing an Ethereal Style Down to Earth

At Ace Contemporary Exhibitions, small shows by Robert Irwin and Mary Corse gracefully play off each other, providing insights into how the spare work of each artist needs to be seen.

In the center of an elegantly proportioned gallery, a thin 12-foot column made by Irwin in 1970 presides over the room’s emptiness like a fragile sentinel. A cross section of the perfectly crafted, clear plastic piece is V-shaped, causing its contour to resemble that of the Stealth bomber’s wings.

Optically, Irwin’s icy tower fractures the gallery’s space. As the eye moves around the room, passing by the untitled work, it’s like a patch of visual turbulence. This subtly disorienting experience is the equivalent of looking at a spoon standing in a glass of water, with the spoon’s handle appearing discontinuous exactly where it enters the liquid.

For the strongest effect from Irwin’s nearly invisible sculpture, it’s best to look at the space around it--essentially to view the piece peripherally. The gallery’s emptiness suddenly seems full. Nothingness feels palpable, even sensuous, and objects seem to lose their substance.

This is precisely the type of attention also elicited by Corse’s four paintings in a nearby room. All made this year, these quietly ravishing works bathed in natural light similarly energize the space around them.

Each consists of between three and 13 vertical bands in various shades of black. The paint on most of the bands is a mixture of acrylic and tiny glass spheres, the kind that makes highway signs reflective. The remaining bands are flat, light-absorbent black.

Like Irwin’s column, Corse’s paintings invite viewers to pay attention to the space between themselves and the works’ surfaces. Springing to life as one walks by, the bands seem to shift colors, from dazzling silver to steely gray to impenetrable black. The paintings’ textures also change dramatically, appearing to run through various grades of sandpaper before dissolving into shimmering, liquid light and then snapping back into pure black.

Although both these artists’ works are often discussed in terms of immateriality verging on some sort of mysticism, each actually brings such heady ideas down to earth. Treating light as a material for sculpture and painting, Irwin and Corse invite viewers to experience it for themselves, intimately, physically and without reference to otherworldly transcendence.

* Ace Contemporary Exhibitions, 5514 Wilshire Blvd., (213) 935-4411, through September. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Choreographed: Part soft-core porn and part homage to synchronized swimming, Howard Schatz’s lush color photographs at G. Ray Hawkins Gallery are too tasteful and too tacky to be very interesting.

Shot underwater in a nicely decorated swimming pool, all but two of these mid-size prints depict fair-skinned women cavorting with diaphanous fabrics in an impressive variety of gymnastic poses. The remaining two images show sinewy men flaunting their physiques in less outlandish postures.

Each highly mannered picture goes to great lengths to try to endow a silly idea with the gravitas of artistic seriousness. The result is an overwrought cliche, one that would be funny if it weren’t burdened with such artsy pretense.

To their credit, Schatz’s photographs of several members of the San Francisco Ballet are masterfully crafted. The 32 images displayed all have been meticulously printed, with crystal-clear figures, pretty air bubbles and glassy reflections floating in front of dense black backgrounds. This velvety emptiness provides a stark contrast to shapely limbs, torsos, breasts and buttocks, which have been specially lighted so as to appear to be made of porcelain.

Recalling stills from silent movies, Schatz’s photographs invite viewers to imagine how much time it must have taken to shoot them. With the waist-length locks of redheads and blonds drifting freely through the water and reams of sheer fabric keeping frontal nudity to a minimum, these images speak of a painstaking commitment to tasteful composition.

This high degree of technical facility, however, eliminates any possible trace of camp frivolity that otherwise might save Schatz’s photos from being tedious rehashes of shopworn conventions. As a body of work, “Waterdance” may dress up nude photography with technical wizardry, but it fails to deliver anything significantly different from what has already been seen to a point of overexposure.

* G. Ray Hawkins Gallery, 908 Colorado Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 394-5558, through Saturday. Closed Sundays and Mondays.