A Liberating Vision of the World in Pastels

A mesmerizing selection of 22 small pastel drawings by Lucas Samaras takes viewers on wild rides through fantastic landscapes, mysterious interiors and multifaceted abstractions. To visit this terrific exhibition at PaceWildenstein Gallery is to enter a highly charged world in which vitality spills out of inanimate objects and the spaces between things crackle with energy.

Samaras’ earliest pastels, made between 1958 and 1965, resemble Minimalist abstractions--except that their compositions are too eccentric, their surfaces too sensuous and their colors too flashy to fit into this category without radically expanding it. An odd combination of formal rigor and Pop gregariousness, these dazzling drawings have the presence of crazy quilts with minds of their own.

In 1974, after working with a wide variety of other media for nearly a decade, Samaras returned to pastels, making a series of strange still lifes and enigmatic interiors. Each of his still lifes depicts a small vase of flowers that hovers above kaleidoscopic patterns or floats in front of pulsating skies.

Many of Samaras’ interiors focus on levitating couples in tangled embraces. But the floors, walls and windows of these unfurnished rooms steal the show.

The more closely you scrutinize them, the more they appear to dissolve into slippery force fields. In nearly all of Samaras’ drawings, tiny flecks of color swirl around one another, like subatomic particles caught up in whirlwinds.

In 1981, Samaras again returned to pastels, spending much of the next two years drawing still lifes, interiors and self-portraits. The bold heads in the portraits stare at viewers so intensely that they recall larger paintings by Vincent Van Gogh and Francis Bacon. Wonderfully distorted, Samaras’ face seems to swim in a realm free of reality’s constraints.

The best thing about all of Samaras’ pastels is that they never pretend to give viewers a tour of his obviously complex inner life. Too ambitious to fall for such sentimental self-expression, these virtuoso drawings do not invite viewers inside the artist’s mind as much as they entice us to try to get outside of our own. Leaving the dull habits of convention far behind, Samaras’ entrancing pictures delve deeply into the chaos of the physical world.

* PaceWildenstein Gallery, 9540 Wilshire Blvd., Beverly Hills, (310) 205-5522, through Jan. 18. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Araki’s ‘Range’: Japanese photographer Nobuyoshi Araki is best known in this country for his seemingly endless series of pictures of naked women. Although many of his sitters strike conventional poses, some have their arms, legs and torsos bound with thick ropes. Of these, some are helplessly suspended in midair.

Despite the flagrantly shocking nature of these photos, what’s most remarkable is that nearly every woman depicted looks as if she’s too bored to care that she’s going through the motions of another tiresome photo session. Palpable in Araki’s casually theatrical images is a sense of bittersweet ennui.

This loaded emotion receives more elaborate treatment in a series of still lifes and skyscapes Araki shot on the balcony of his Tokyo home in 1991, the year after his wife (and favorite subject) died of cancer. Titled “From Close Range,” this devastatingly simple series of black-and-white photographs presents a side of the prolific artist’s oeuvre that is rarely seen outside of Japan.

At Blum & Poe Gallery, a handsome selection of fairly large prints push-pinned to the wall focuses on the mundane objects Araki happened to have lying around his rain-soaked balcony, including a rusty table, several bouquets of wilted flowers, a dead salamander’s body, a bunch of apples cut in half, a mismatched pair of tennis shoes and a white cat.

Most of the photos have the presence of rudimentary exercises, of incidental still lifes quickly set up to see if any beauty or poignancy could be found in Araki’s immediate surroundings. Although nearly all of the objects depicted can be seen as tired metaphors that invoke mortality in a thoroughly cliched manner, these images still manage to convey powerful sentiments.

Insistently naive, they reveal that cliches are meaningless only when they fail to hit home. When they do hit home, even the most common things seem to be too loaded with meaning for words.

* Blum & Poe Gallery, 2042 Broadway, Santa Monica, (310) 453-8311, through Jan. 4. Closed Sundays and Mondays.