At USC, Two in the Modernist Tradition

Very shortly, 20th century art will be chronologically over. The aesthetic of innovation that fueled it has long since been codified, institutionalized and domesticated. Still, it remains an expressive language practiced around the globe. It’s possible to find interesting variations on old themes made in unfamiliar climes.

USC’s Fisher Gallery provides a case in point in “Miquel Navarro and Carmen Calvo.” It showcases recent work by two artists from Spain. Both are said to be well-known in Europe and Latin America. Calvo represented the Iberian country at this year’s Venice Biennial. This traveling sampler constitutes their California debut.

Both were born in the Franco era--Navarro in 1945, Calvo in 1950--well after the trauma of the Spanish Civil War. All the same, the dictatorial regime tended to keep the country at least psychologically isolated from the modern mainstream. Nothing of that appears directly in this work, save perhaps Calvo’s preoccupation with death, but that’s been endemic in Spanish art for centuries.

Calvo is basically an Assemblage artist but inclined to use sculpturally cast objects and life-size scale. Her largest work, “Silence,” consists of literally hundreds of identical knives hung on the wall as if raining down on dozens of tombstone shapes. Everything is ghostly white, apparently molded from plaster. Despite numerical proliferation, the work has a minimalist austerity.

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It comes as no surprise that Calvo’s art evokes memory, since Assemblage does that almost automatically. Take “Display Case, L’Evanouissement.” The French word evokes a poet like Rimbaud and designates fainting or fading away. The piece is your standard collection of precious junk arranged in a waist-high glass cabinet. Anyone who’s had a fair sampling of this kind of thing from Cornell to Kienholz could be forgiven for swooning from boredom.

Yet Calvo manages to rekindle a sense of mystery, doubling her meaning by casting objects as if mummified. The work becomes at once a repository of personal trinkets and an archeological sample case.

She manages another quasi-original variation in “It Invites Me to Dream.” A panel of weathered sheet metal is covered with ambiguous, leach-like worms of terra cotta that are obviously primitive handmade objects. The general interest of the work comes from a combination of neurotic subjectivity and clinical detachment.

Navarro seems to have caught on to the fact that the most compelling Postmodern art being made is architectural. He fashions fantasy cities from cast-metal modules that look like buildings principally because of the way he arranges them. The artist is not out to make literal miniatures as did, the French couple Anne and Patrick Poirier. He’s more like the American Joel Shapiro, who sometimes works with ingots in rudimentary geometrics that will sustain more than one reading.

“Under the Moon,” for example, is a collection of lead and zinc objects arranged on the floor. Juxtaposition suggests an urban skyline, but shapes aren’t placed in either the grid or circular ranks of conventional street plans. Instead modules are arranged around a central upright that--in scale--would be an impossibly tall skyscraper. There’s a suggestion of a holy ground like Stonehenge. Maybe the artist is making a sly joke about the human tendency to revere that which is largest.

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Navarro’s most extensive effort is “Red City,” fashioned from units of rusty iron. It is more specifically architectural. Areas are laid out to suggest an old walled medieval quarter, industrial sections, outlying suburbs. Civic centers tend to be marked again with impossibly over-scaled uprights that could be anything from minarets to ICBMs. The possibility of an equation between war and religion is highly likely.

It’s even more likely that one structure makes a very topical humorous aside. Navarro is said to rearrange his pieces for every showing. How could a hip Spanish artist showing in L.A. resist making reference to the most widely publicized current artistic connection between the two places? In the midst of “Red City” stands a configuration of variously stacked rhomboidal units that has to represent Frank Gehry’s highly praised new Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain.

It’s a funny, generous gesture tending to confirm the impression of an artist whose work bespeaks unpretentiousness, grace and penetrating wit worn lightly.

Anyone into the esoteric hobby of collecting offbeat exhibition catalogs will be attracted to the bilingual pair here. Each contains a boxed multiple as the cover. The show was the brainchild of Fisher Gallery director Selma Holo. Spanish curators were Manuel Blanco of Madrid’s Polytechnic University and Juan Manuel Bonet of Valencia’s Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art.

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* “Miquel Navarro and Carmen Calvo,” USC, Fisher Gallery, 832 Exposition Blvd.; to Nov. 15, closed Sunday and Monday, (213) 740-4748.