A Hit-and-Miss Look at Basquiat’s Passion

Just in time to cash in on the notoriety generated by “Basquiat,” Julian Schnabel’s recent bio-pic, Kantor Gallery has mounted a show of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s work of the 1980s. Though “Basquiat” had some operatic moments in which Schnabel indulged his runaway megalomania, in general it took great care with its subject. This show, by contrast, is small, spotty and careless.

Certainly the case can be made that Basquiat’s made-to-order primitivism and fulminating street smarts are more interesting in terms of social and economic history than aesthetics, which is to say that the overheated market of the 1980s valued “raw” Expressionism as a commodity. Basquiat, as its token wild child, fulfilled its multiple fantasies.

Still, even a lack of passion for Basquiat’s art as art is no excuse for the haphazardly selected items on view here. Without any real framework (conceptual, chronological or otherwise), what we get is scarcely disguised marginalia--a random group of silk-screens and drawings, plus a couple of very mediocre paintings.

There are, nonetheless, moments here. Basquiat’s sarcastic wit goes for broke in a 1982 drawing featuring a vehement alley cat garbed in Ku Klux Klan regalia, and in another 1984 drawing that manages to situate back-of-the-magazine advertisements for magic worms and onion gum in the context of the Audience Hall at Persepolis.

Also noteworthy is an eight-panel comic book from 1979, crammed full of New Jersey-bound balls of heat and sex-crazed alien stalkers, which is unexpected and revealing. It suggests just how far Basquiat traveled from the most generic of starting points, even with too little time.

* Kantor Gallery, 8642 Melrose Ave., (310) 659-5388, through Nov. 9. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Mirages: Sharon Ellis’ quartet of new paintings at Christopher Grimes Gallery provides a phantasmagoria of richly colored, intensely detailed mirages: a “Sanctum” covered with black teardrops and yellow drops of dew, a “Solarium” with red-hot points of light, a “Lunarium” filled with deathly white blossoms and a “Mysterium” presided over by a pair of disembodied eyes.

Finely wrought, indeed perfectly exquisite, these images are as forbidding as they are magnificent. It’s not that they aren’t inviting, but rather that their phantom spaces permit no entry. Unlike the psychedelia they superficially resemble, they do not play mind games with the real so much as expound the notion that art exists alongside the real, not in it.

This paradox, typical of the 19th century Symbolism that informs Ellis’ project, is everywhere present here. Her surfaces are so refined that they seem as if they could only have been fabricated by machine--that they were made by hand makes their unearthliness not only thematic, but somehow actual.

It’s both surprising, and not, that these paintings are decorative. Ellis’ brand of high-flown Romanticism would seem to eschew any attempt to please; yet, repetition and symmetry--the hallmarks of the decorative--are also the characteristics of a dream. Dreams are the ultimate ruin of Realism and are Ellis’ prime turf.

Interestingly, the Symbolists prized decorative painting above all other genres: They argued that as originally conceived by the Egyptians, decoration was all about the visual expression of an intangible idea or a metaphorical place and that it was only later that decoration was devalued as mere distraction. Ellis has recovered this occulted bit of history and through it created a stunning body of work.

* Christopher Grimes Gallery, 916 Colorado Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 597-3373, through Nov. 16. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Happy Faces: At PaceWildenstein-MacGill, recent work by Nobuyoshi Araki reveals why the photographer has achieved cult/guru status in his native Japan and why he most likely never will here.

Araki has made a career defying Japan’s stringent censorship laws. He has photographed friends, strangers and mistresses enacting all manner of provocative scenes: female nudes performing complicated rope tricks in the love hotels of the Shinjuku district of Tokyo or girls dressed fetchingly in uniforms, who may actually be schoolgirls but more probably are not.

Shock value, however, is a relative thing, and in the U.S., where frankly sexual imagery is not just available but unavoidable, Araki’s bondage pictures have little frisson. They are almost sweet. Ironically, the depreciating titillation factor maneuvers us out of the role of prurient spectator and toward the more interesting aspects of the work.

These aspects hinge upon its autobiographical nature. Araki refers to what he does as “I-photography,” and indeed he has documented his life in Tokyo, his wife, his lovers and even devoted two of his 100-plus books to his cat. Like Nan Goldin and the other members of the so-called Boston Group (who are ubiquitous at the moment), Araki’s work is prolific, obsessive, steeped in gossip and thrives on the innuendo it creates.

By mere proximity to a black-and-white shot of an impressively acrobatic nude, a lushly colored grid of tightly cropped female faces looks like a documentation of Araki’s own passions. (It may well be, since he claims to have had sex with every woman he’s ever photographed.) On the other hand, the eroticism of the images may well be less specific.

Araki has also been quoted as saying that he photographs nothing but happiness. Indeed, these faces, saturated with color so that they almost glow, radiate well-being. Araki renders them as completely at home with themselves, something like latter-day icons of beatitude.

* PaceWildensteinMacGill, 9540 Wilshire Blvd., Beverly Hills, (310) 205-5522, through Nov. 9. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Romantic Poetry: Proustian reverie, Wildean aplomb, Baudelairean doom and a Pop sensibility mix it up (as always) in Richard Hawkins’ new collages at Richard Telles Fine Art.

If the earlier collages, with their yellow Post-it notes and ubiquitous rough edges, evinced a poignancy that at times went so far over the top it approached bathos, these later works are quite different. Their studied insouciance and total disdain for purity make them not so much emblematic of frustrated desire as redolent with a finely honed aestheticism.

The 19th century dandy is the aesthete par excellence. Hawkins has long been enamored of exotic figures like the Count de Montesquieu who served J.K. Huysmans as the model for Des Esseintes in “A Rebours” and later Proust for the Baron de Charlus. Hawkins patches together fragments of contemporary dandies from a panoply of men’s fashion magazines, disengaging them from one set of hothouse narratives and enmeshing them in another.

If the fragment itself is a seductive form, insofar as it seems to promise more than it is willing to reveal, Hawkins redoubles the erotic charge by offering fragments of fragments. The models themselves are only part of the picture; the saturated colors of the fashion spreads, isolated as disembodied geometric forms, are equally alluring and untouchable.

Text figures heavily, with photographers’ names running up the edge of illegible images, upside-down titles to unnamed articles, etc. These words and bits of phrases are talismans, symbolic of withheld information. Spread across the collages, they create their own brand of Romantic poetry, at once mysterious and mundane.

* Richard Telles Fine Art, 7380 Beverly Blvd., (213) 965-5578, through Nov. 9. Closed Sundays and Mondays.