Powerful, Intriguing Works in ‘Corpora in Extremis’

Contemporary painting grounded in Old Master art never gets very fashionable, but there are always a few artists who insist on working this way as a labor of love. Two of them are currently on view at Loyola Marymount University’s Laband Art Gallery in a show called “Corpora in Extremis: Recent Works by Patty Wickman and Hanneline Rogeberg.”

Gallery director Gordon Fuglie organized the show. He seems to have a taste for this kind of thing, having previously displayed the work of related figures like Jerome Witkin. It’s always nice to see a curator with independent taste, and he may be onto something.

This work has a different twist than previous Old Master variations that leaned to satire. It’s far more heartfelt and personalized. Although technically controlled, emotionally it borders on Expressionism. It seems somehow relevant in a culture so confused it doesn’t know what to call itself except Post-Something. Postmodern. Post-Cold War.

Both artists are thirty-something. Both use old-fashioned allegory to address contemporary problems centered around identity. Wickman teaches at UCLA. A Catholic, she clearly makes biblical allusions and appears to draw her principal painterly inspiration from Zurburan and Manet. Of her seven large paintings and related drawings on view the most complex and compelling is “A Thief in the Night.”

It depicts a loft interior and is full of visual anomalies like an old “What’s Wrong With This Picture?” puzzle. The thief of the title, for example, appears to be escaping out of a window by climbing a short ladder he doesn’t really need. He’s taken his loot from a group of valuables neatly laid out on the floor like yard sale items, as if awaiting his selection. Their owners stand submissively behind a velvet rope, hands clasped behind them but not tied. Their little dog sits quietly on a chair staring at the viewer.

The scene raises all kinds of questions about the identity of the intruder--who appears to be unarmed--and the passivity of the victims, who clearly have him outnumbered. In the end, it appears as a ritual enactment of the biblical belief that material things don’t count.

But it’s not the moral of the story that really counts with either of these artists, it’s the strange, haunted sense of profound concern bodied forth by their imagery. A work like Wickman’s “Anonymous (With St. Agatha),” for example, certainly has a theme. What grabs attention, however, is the sheer oddity of a very realistically rendered nude female. She walks toward us, holding lumps of something crystalline in each hand, but her face, breasts and crotch area have been pixilated like a censored TV picture. There’s more than a whiff of old-fashioned Surrealism here, but its amorality is replaced with a strong ethical inquiry. It’s powerful stuff.

Rogeberg is a Norwegian based in this country currently teaching at Rutgers University in New Jersey. It’s no exaggeration to say that her figures combine the monumentality of Michelangelo with the juicy sensuality of Rubens. But where the great masters used physicality to celebrate life, Rogeberg employs it to pose dilemmas about spiritual transcendence.

All her figures are nude, giant, mature women often in intimate physical contact but never erotic--with the possible exception of a small piece where one licks another’s face. These are allegories about women trying to solve problems of relationship. In some cases it is a matter of kinship between different women as in a big, lush untitled composition of four figures. Two grandmotherly types each lift a younger nude as if trying to revive a comatose daughter.

In “Impossible Up” one amazonian female tries to pull another from the ground while standing on her chest. There’s a wonderful absurdity about the scene, but here the women look almost like twins suggesting a problem in relation to the self. This could also be true of “Ex-It,” where one giant woman seems to be giving birth to another, equally as mature.

* Loyola Marymount University, Laband Art Gallery, 7900 Loyola Blvd., through April 26, closed Sundays through Tuesdays, (310) 338-2880.