‘Images’ Focuses on the Artist as Subject

At the University of Judaism’s small Platt Gallery two artists prove there’s more than one way to make a portrait. In an exhibition titled “Images of the Art World,” Sylvia Shap and Rena Small share an interest in using citizens of their subculture as their subject. Both show an attitude that values the expressive over the formal. Aside from that, they’re polar opposites.

Shap shows some 15 life-size, head-and-shoulders likenesses. Their careful precision will put some viewers in mind of an old master like Holbein. Yet few will confound this work with historical portraiture. It’s not quite clear what sets it apart. It may be well-informed Modernist relativity. It may be some lack of knowledge about the structure of traditional art.

“I think of myself more as a psychological journalist than as a portrait painter,” Shap writes in a posted statement. That’s the way her work feels. Every image captures some quality in the sitter that seems to nail them temperamentally. Shap comes across like a brilliant caricaturist without a malicious bone in her body. Critic Robert Hughes looks like the big, handsome Aussie he is, but Shap captures an edge of baroque, almost florid, naughtiness that conveys a sense that she’s both seen and seen through him. That same quality of extra insight comes across in her characterization of curator Maurice Tuchman. His dandifed and confrontational demeanor is what everybody notices. Shap sees something elusive and smoldering lurking in his shadowed face.

Shap’s work becomes evermore convincing. If these amalgams of painting and drawing occasionally ignore certain architectural rules of picture-making, they do so to achieve goals the artist considers more important. None of the images have settings. Occasionally, as in double portraits of collectors Billy Wilder, Peter Norton and their wives, the background is solid red. Mostly it’s blank. Shap clearly doesn’t want to deal with the sociological envelop that contains her sitters. The choice emphasizes their independence, individuality and isolation.

“Woman With a Heart Surgery Scar: Charlene Bleifer” is one of several pieces suggesting that if she chose, Shap could juice up her surfaces and be a really meaty painter like, say, Lucien Freud. Instead, she underplays the material existence of her subjects asserting that it’s not their corporeal being that interests her, it’s their spirit.

The prosaic detachment of Shap’s images suggests she may use photographic source material. Rena Small’s work leaves no question. These are camera prints pure and simple. About 90 of them are tacked up side-by-side in two grid-like groupings. All are portraits of artist’s hands.

It’s not exactly news that hands are expressive, highly individualized and important to us. As Billy Al Bengston says in a posted quote, “Be hard to get things done without them.”

Small finds them more eloquent than traditional portraits. Those on view are gratifyingly revealing and, almost by nature, witty. Ed Rusha rests the fingers of one hand in the palm of the other suggesting, “It’s all give and take.” Alexis Smith has her fingers intertwined showing tension inside a gesture of repose. Chris Burden holds a tiny toy truck that makes his hands those of Gulliver. The installation is a nice browse. It might play a little better as a book.

The exhibition was organized by the gallery’s chief curator Victor Raphael and his assistant Inge Friedman.

* University of Judaism, Platt Gallery, through Feb. 23, 15600 Mulholland Drive. Closed Friday and Saturday, (310) 476-9777, Ext. 203.