Man Ray in Los Angeles: Artifacts From Inward Period

Man Ray once referred to California as a “beautiful prison,” and indeed the decade he spent in Los Angeles--the subject of a fine exhibition co-organized by Track 16 and Robert Berman Gallery--was a strange one. It was marked on the one hand by anxiety (Man Ray spent much of the early 1940s repainting the masterpieces he left behind as he fled war-ravaged Paris).

On the other, it was marked by a grudging acceptance of his self-willed anonymity in this, the land of show biz (the catalog Man Ray designed for his last show here, in 1948 at the William Copley Gallery, was titled “To Be Continued Unnoticed”).

The exhibition is filled with works produced before and after his stay in the United States--some of them major, more of them less so--as well as drawings, photographs, objects, chess sets, letters and other ephemera produced during and related to his time here. It attempts to create a fresh context for understanding the life and work of one of the premier Surrealists while also proposing a centrality for Southern California within the canon of modernism, specifically Surrealism.

Indeed, Man Ray wryly noted that there was “more Surrealism rampant in Hollywood than all the Surrealists could invent in a lifetime.” Yet to judge from this exhibition, California didn’t necessarily inspire him in that direction. While Dali took the opportunity to collaborate with the movie industry--lampooning it in the same breath--Man Ray turned inward here; thus, the most interesting developments for him were personal.

It was in L.A., for example, that he met Juliet Browner, who was to become his wife and muse for the remainder of his life. He also formed bonds with the writer Henry Miller, the collector and art world figure Gloria de Herrera, and the artist Knud Merrild, whose work was to be an inspiration for the artist’s later “natural paintings.”

On this count, then, what becomes most interesting here are the letters, homages, memorabilia, literary endeavors and photographs. These include a tiny painting of a butterfly made for De Herrera; a wonderfully cynical book of drawings called “Alphabets for Adults”; a snapshot of Juliet stretched out like an odalisque on a couch in Man Ray’s Vine Street studio; and a photo of the artist and Marcel Duchamp sitting beneath a Parisian street sign, “Rue de la Vieille Lanterne,” which just happened to have been taken on a Hollywood stage set.

* Track 16 and Robert Berman Gallery, 2525 Michigan Ave., Building C, (310) 254-4678 and (310) 315-9506, through Dec. 27. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Letters and Words: A pair of cheap black metal bookends, blown up to Wagnerian proportions, provides at least one context for JonMarc Edwards’ new and typically witty work at Newspace.

The bookends are a visual conceit designed to refer to language, but the rest of the show consists of paintings in which letters, spread across the surface or ingeniously layered, spell out phrases that masquerade as images: turn-of-the-century Viennese graphic designs, mazes, perversely illegible road maps. Which way one takes these forms first--as words or as pictures--depends upon one’s predilections, though Edwards goes to great lengths to outmaneuver stale habits of perception.

These paintings are crafty and more than a little arch. They fail entirely when Edwards gets painterly (as in “Graphic Sex,” where the letters literally get all mushy, wrapping themselves around one another like bits of spaghetti). They work best when they are self-reflexive (as in “Light,” in which the title is spelled out in white at the center of a deep black field) rather than random (as in “Sex Cigs Booze Jazz,” which looks either like a proud roster of vices or a slick advertisement for a 12-step program).

Yet this latter image may be more fortuitous than it initially appears, as Edwards is trying, in the process of enacting the textual nature of images, to get at the question of pleasure. So are countless other young L.A. painters. What makes his take novel is the fact that he never pits pleasure against critique, offering something at least fractionally more nuanced than the usual sap about art as entertainment and the equally insidious equation of art and pedagogy.

* Newspace, 5241 Melrose Ave., (213) 469-9353, through Oct. 19. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Tropes: A woman is suspended upside down between a pair of parted curtains, as if performing a kind of Grand Guignol water ballet. A bodiless head is crowned by a sleepy angel. Another head is all but smothered by a fast-encroaching haze. Carlos Vargas Pons’ large, hand-wringing paintings at Iturralde Gallery trigger an immediate, and none too pleasing, sense of deja vu.

Here are all the stylistic excesses of ‘80-style Neo-Expressionism: fevered brush strokes, thick globs of paint and the requisite grand themes of martyrdom, ecstasy and death. One wants to assume that this young Mexican artist is appropriating these now-exhausted tropes with his tongue in his cheek. This doesn’t seem to be the case.

What this looks like instead is an exercise: Pons is working through both Georg Baselitz (thus, the profusion of upside-down motifs) and Francesco Clemente (likewise the surfeit of massive, disembodied heads) to get to something uniquely his own. Clearly, however, there is more work to be done, especially because the work of each of these older artists presupposes a particular cultural and historical context that Pons does not share--for Baselitz, Germany’s postwar burden of guilt, and for Clemente, Italy’s undying legacy of classical mythology.

* Iturralde Gallery, 154 N. La Brea Ave., (213) 937-4267, through Oct. 12. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Quiet Strength: “The World of Silence,” Jonathan White’s new installation at Angles Gallery, is so poetic and so heartbreakingly delicate that its aggressiveness isn’t immediately visible.

The show is ostensibly a meditation upon quiet, inspired by the artist’s obsession with Glenn Gould’s recordings of Bach’s Goldberg Variations, which are punctuated with repeated moments demarcated by the virtual absence of sound.

Two images in the gallery’s main space, done on blueprint paper that will fade to a dullish purple over time, depict over-scaled passages from this work in which all we see are the five horizontal lines of the staff and the merest fragments of musical notes, hovering at the edges of the frame.

The images are modishly minimal, as is an array of crumpled white tissues under glass, which bear the traces of the artist’s tears; a huge bolt of white canvas, which was left out in a forest for six months and whose surface has become as beautiful as a piece of marble; a series of drawings made with an ink-soaked branch; and more blueprints, these of live ferns and their clotted roots.

One thinks here of other artists equally enamored of refinement: Kiki Smith, Claudia Matzko and Peter Hopkins, for example. Yet whereas Smith willingly bares the excruciating underside of elegance, White is more coy. Still, it isn’t difficult to see the spent tissues as souvenirs of the artist’s capacity to experience pain, in the manner of Goethe’s self-consciously romantic Werther; or to see the spastic, indeed tormented, lines of the ink drawings less as haikus than as Rorshachs.

And in this, White’s coolly controlled essay on silence, time and chance gives way to something far more interesting, something weird and self-obsessed, which is to say human, and utterly sympathetic.

* Angles Gallery, 2222 Main St., Santa Monica, (310) 396-5019, through Oct. 19. Closed Sundays and Mondays.