‘Way Out’ Gives Drawing Its Due

In the pantheon of visual arts, drawings are often viewed with a dismissive sneer as the poor stepchild of the “finer” arts. Or drawings are perceived as serving a supportive function, preparatory work for the real thing, a painting or a sculpture.

Such a stigma is grounded in half-truth and unfair bias. Germany’s Jochen Stucke’s fascinating exhibition at Woodbury University demonstrates the unique power of drawing to convey ideas and thought processes. He gives drawing a good and noble name.

In the 1980s, Stucke’s work relied on the appeal of finely rendered, every-hair-accounted-for style. His newer work embraces a roughness of draftsmanship. Stucke draws expressive energy from the friction between the recognizable and unfinished qualities within an image. At the same time, much of his work is not about a singular image, but about variations on a theme that convey multiple perspectives.

Several different series of drawings take from works of literature and opera, as well as art history. Figures are little more than metaphors. If there is a theme to the show he calls “Way Out,” it is the notion of escape--and desire for escape.

In the series titled “The Tower,” inspired by a short story by German writer Wolfgang Fehse, a protagonist seems to writhe and squirm in repressively cramped quarters. A faceless mass of muscle and contorting limbs, he appears to be trapped in a tower, struggling for freedom. Another figure in flight clambers around on rooftops and through windows in “Casanova.”

In “Don Juan,” here based on Mozart’s opera “Don Giovanni,” the focus is more on ambiguous carnality. We sense the presence of furtive sexual encounters between Don Juan and his inamorata (perhaps more than one). But in the most suggestive image, “Night,” aggressive scribbles obscure the drawing, rendering the lovemaking abstract.

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Stucke’s method of cultural cross-reference smacks of an effective post-Modernist tactic, especially in his series “Questions to Velazquez.” Here, he spins off from Velazquez’s celebrated painting “Las Meninas,” adroitly deconstructing it in a series of raw, half-finished images. The result is the antithesis of Velazquez’s fastidious realism.

There is a sociopolitical agenda at work here, too. Stucke reshuffles the hierarchies embedded in the original painting. Even the dog in “Las Meninas” is subject to spin doctoring.

Ostensibly, such thematic elements are downplayed in “The Braunschweig Portfolio,” a series of etchings commissioned by the 1,000-year-old German city to commemorate its history. But Stucke inserts his personal aesthetic here, too, establishing a fragile relationship between realism and abstraction. He favors high rooftop views, the roof being both close to the sky (allegorically close to freedom) and that which separates people from the sky. Such subtle tensions in Stucke’s art give his work its sting and insight.

DETAILS

* WHAT: “Way Out,” drawings and etchings by Jochen Stucke.

* WHERE: Woodbury University Gallery, 7500 Glenoaks Blvd., Burbank.

* WHEN: Noon-4 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday through Nov. 9.

* CALL: (818) 767-0888.