A Little Tenderness

A sense of tenderness usually associated with femininity suffuses Elizabeth Peyton’s intimate pictures of young men.

Made up of wispy pencil strokes, tenuously fingered smears of charcoal and delicate puddles of watercolor that appear to have been coaxed into shape with awkward honesty, these unabashedly romantic images deal with adoration and vulnerability without being sappy or silly.

Aside from a small drawing of the 31-year-old artist’s niece, all of Peyton’s page-size works on paper at Regen Projects depict sensitive men who have somehow touched her life. In the sweetly sentimental world of her imagination, distinctions are not drawn between pop music stars and otherwise anonymous friends and acquaintances.

Peyton renders everyone with the same casually breathless affection, whether she knows them personally or only from their songs and publicity photos. The guys in her drawings appear to be much younger than their years: Fresh, innocent and attractively inexperienced, they’re worlds away from being jaded, cynical or bitter, even if they’ve already been a bit bruised by life in the fast lane.

Peyton’s men don’t exactly pout, but they do look as if they have barely outgrown such a childish response to life’s problems. Too cool to reveal themselves so obviously, yet too sweet to completely hide their feelings, these guys belong to the emotionally tumultuous phase when adolescence swiftly slips, and painfully lurches, into adulthood.

In Peyton’s hands, their subdued, somewhat restrained expressions dovetail with the manner in which she draws their china-doll complexions and not yet fully formed features. Giving her subjects introspective depth drives home the notion that there’s more to these works than immediately meets the eye.

Strictly speaking, Peyton’s drawings are not portraits of far-off stars who live in the prepackaged world of mass-marketed entertainment, but portraits of personal heroes who live in her imagination.

Paradoxically, Peyton’s rich inner life doesn’t leave viewers out of the picture. You don’t have to know who’s a pop star and who’s only a friend to be touched by this exhibition. After all, these pictures are not concerned with the facts of biography, but with the power of art--with the ways in which heart-felt fantasies and beliefs get entangled with the rest of the world.

* Regen Projects, 629 N. Almont Drive, (310) 276-5424, through March 1. Closed Sundays and Mondays.