Art Review

Bringing In the Clowns: More than 125 pint-size clowns, gnomes and grinches greet visitors to Jim Lawrence’s sweetly demented exhibition of carved wood figurines. To step into the small back room of Koplin Gallery is to feel as if you have stumbled upon an eccentric puppeteer’s secret storeroom--after hours, of course, when the idiosyncratic characters that have sprung from his imagination are free to make their own mischief.

An impressive range (and depth) of emotion spills from Lawrence’s swiftly whittled sculptures. Melancholy, glee, sorrow, sympathy and bedeviled amusement are only a few of the sentiments that can be read on the remarkably expressive faces of his menagerie of misfits.

Entranced, enraptured and occasionally enraged, 25 clowns bedecked in colorful costumes parade around two walls. More than half of these outlandish entertainers play violins, and all stand on only one leg.

Makeshift crutches, pegs and prosthetics support their pudgy, sometimes rotund bodies, as their often gnarled hands play music. Dancing and singing to whatever tragi-comic melodies move them, Lawrence’s little people celebrate the spirit of rising above the hard-luck life regularly served up.

The two other walls are covered by wacky constellations of even wackier characters. A frog-headed creature whose fingertips emit flames hangs out near a pair of limber acrobats, a strutting, buck-toothed Herman Munster and a bug-eyed ring-master who couldn’t be prouder. Nearby, a self-absorbed street-philosopher ponders some conundrum as a schizophrenic literally splits in two and a human-headed insect flies overhead.

As a group, Lawrence’s sculptures combine the comically macabre aura of Tim Burton’s movies with the poignancy of Tim Ebner’s paintings of humane animals. Despite the compendium of difficulties that afflict Lawrence’s creatures, they evoke more joy than despair. If Frankenstein’s monster had a chance to celebrate Christmas, he’d probably hang these fantastic figurines on his tree, and leave it up long after all its needles had fallen off.

*

* Koplin Gallery, 464 N. Robertson Blvd., (310) 657-9843, through Dec. 31. Closed Sundays and Mondays.