Expressive Nature of Things

Nature has always suckled art, supplying inspiration in various forms, including pretty pictures and role models of natural behavior and evolution. The dependent relationship has grown ever more complicated in this century, as modernists rebelled against old traditions--including landscape painting--and tried to find their rightful place in the post-industrial world.

Mother Nature still rears her head in the art world, though. Take, for example, the five artists assembled for the show “New Organic Form,” now at Sylmar’s Century Gallery. They belong to a definitively 20th century art trend that refers to nature obliquely rather than head-on. Organic forms, after all, have played their part in important art as diverse as Joan Miro’s surrealist squiggles and Arshile Gorky’s globular, oozing abstract Expressionism.

Similarly, the artists in this show take their cues from the natural world, mostly avoiding the right angles and aspects of symmetry and order found in the man-made domain. In this show, the forms tend to be elegantly amorphous, evoking bones, trees, amoebic blobs and softly rounded contours, hinting at sexuality or other life in the vegetable and animal realms.

While the artists offer divergent styles and ideas, the common theme is the examination of the interaction of art and nature, a cultural safe zone of each artist’s own devising. The most compelling, and also most diverse, aesthetic is found in the work of Laurent Diemer, who recasts nature and questions the use of natural materials in art. The dialogue between culture and nature is ever present in his work, as with a two-dimensional depiction of seaweed using enamel on paper, and metal wire standing in as kelp.

His charmingly crude wooden sculpture in the center of the gallery takes the gambit further, straddling the line separating natural resources and artistic product. “Star Bouquet” is a set of clumsy star shapes on sticks, set into planters. A group of oddly scaled plywood rectangles contrasts his “Pyramid Tree” with actual hunks of tree branches stuck roughly into an ad hoc “trunk.” Voila, the artist returns wood to its home, sort of.

The “Forest Seed” pieces consist of rugged coatrack-like armatures holding slapped-together fragments of trees in the vague shape of letters. Here, the facets of nature, art, language and functionality fall into a happy conceptual heap.

Implicit in Diemer’s work is the issue of whether art about nature is exempt from ecological responsibility by virtue of its good intentions. Is it enough to point pleadingly at trees, while exploiting their byproducts?

In another sculptural exhibit scattered on the floor are Chuck Moffit’s invitingly strange, pointy wooden pieces, suggesting sharpened bone fragments or beaks, with one end sheathed in lead. The work plays like both an allegory of constriction and an ironic paean to archeology.

Richard Simeon’s lean and loopy sculptures are made from sleekly polished wood, alluding to bird and animal forms, without making direct references. A sense of floating tendrils puts us in mind of the somewhat surreal behavior of seaweed.

Natalie Kahn’s paintings and pastels present unexplained convergences of curving shapes, bathed in the glow of red light. They appear like close-ups of anatomy, rendered unrecognizable but reminiscent of sexually charged tissue, or the comforts of the womb. “The Three Grandmothers,” a large triptych, shows slightly wrinkled red forms that are only vaguely figurative.

In a niche all its own, E.K. Meadow’s paintings, such as the “Cast a Cold Eye for Yeats” series, are fuzzy and hectic compositions that seem to be bursting with animal life. These are animals in calculated distress, as in a horse-racing scene, which could be a depiction of a stampede. Chaos is brewing.

Throughout the show, things organic find their way into finished artwork, in strange and striking ways. The subtext is that however culture evolves and assimilates the outside world, nature will not be denied.

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BE THERE

“New Organic Form,” through Oct. 30 at Century Gallery, 13000 Sayre St., Sylmar. Hours: 10 a.m.-5 p.m., Monday-Friday; noon-4 p.m., Saturday. (818) 362-3220.