Sculpted Wreck Turns Gallery Patrons Into Looky-Loos

Unbelievably, seven years have passed since Charles Ray last had a solo show of new sculpture in Los Angeles. In the interim, the L.A.-based artist has been exhibiting with regularity at galleries in New York and Europe (Vienna, Paris, Milan). So if you wanted to keep up with one of the most compelling sculptors working today, you simply had to travel.

That’s one reason Ray’s newly opened show at Regen Projects in West Hollywood is an event of unusual interest. The other is that the single new work occupying the gallery is a tour-de-force of skill, wit and imagination. It sets your jaw agape.

“Unpainted Sculpture” is a full-size wrecked Pontiac Grand Am (circa 1991), painstakingly fabricated in all its twisted, smashed-up glory from molded fiberglass painted monochrome gray. The sculptural crack-up sits lightly on the concrete floor of the spare white room, like some artifact from an automobile showroom in Bizarro World.

You can’t take your eyes off it--an experience more commonly had at a freeway pileup than at an art gallery. Poised like a cat on rear haunches, the car leans forward and to the left, heaving toward the devastating point of impact that left the driver’s side front end a squashed mass of mechanical guts.

The sculpture, which took shape over the course of nearly two years’ labor, was made by casting in fiberglass more than a hundred pieces of an actual wreck, which the artist bought as salvage. Among a dizzying proliferation of contradictions held in tense equilibrium here--the principal contradiction being the artistic creation of an object that’s totally destroyed--this wreck is an astutely chosen example of a form made by pure chance.

Ray searched for just the right victim of highway disaster, took it apart piece by piece and made the molded parts. Then, using snapshots of the disassembly process as a guide, he put the pieces back together, the way a kid assembles a plastic model car.

With eloquently crumpled forms billowing like so much drapery in a breeze, a Baroque animation of forms draws you in and around its complex orchestration of mass and space. As you complete your informal accident inspection, you realize that Ray is working here with a classic sculptural vocabulary, executed with graceful dynamism.

The choice of such an all-American model of unsophisticated automobile, favored by sporty-minded drivers on a budget, couldn’t be more perfect. Nor could the particular brand of Winston tires shown in various stages of disarray, each of them proudly labeled “Californian I.” The wrecked car is an instant ruin, like a modern incarnation of a Hellenistic Winged Victory run aground at the end of our amazing, exhausting century.

The work’s toy-like associations are potent. “Unpainted Sculpture” recalls Ray’s eye-popping 1993 sculpture of a fire truck, in which he painstakingly reproduced an ordinary playroom toy but in the vastly enlarged size of an actual hook and ladder. All the playful distortions in the toy were suddenly writ large, resulting in a psychological tangle that mixed up childhood and adult fantasies and realities.

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A wonderfully sneaky one-two punch animates most of Ray’s strongest work, and “Unpainted Sculpture” is no exception. Its stomach-knotting psychological edge unfolds slowly, as the initial novelty of the piece wears off.

The smashed car is a replica that oozes an inescapable sense of queasy adult emergency, born of ordinary childhood playfulness. Like the fire engine, the Pontiac is startling at first sight and then possessed of subtle resonance.

The feeling of shadowy discomfort is heightened by the sculpture’s soft, dull gray color. On one hand the uniform gray serves a simple formal purpose, visually pulling together a vast array of disparate parts: Fenders, seats, dashboard, engine, tires, floor mats, side view mirrors and the rest become a seamless sculptural whole. Your eye, rather than taking in discrete parts, slides continuously over their textured surfaces, just as if they were carved marble or cast bronze.

But the overall gray--think of it as this classically minded sculpture’s pseudo-patina--also recalls a body-shop primer, the kind laid on and sanded to perfection before a car’s glossy finish coat is added. With its usual surface layer missing this car seems somehow exposed, its public face peeled back to reveal a more private stratum.

There isn’t much urge to wonder about the specifics of the actual accident that wrecked the original car. They don’t matter. This crack-up takes place in your head. You read the result of dramatic impact as an accumulation of traumatic extrusions and sudden fissures, large and small, which have been made whole and hopeful through artful labor.

Sculpturally, the twisted wreckage might put you in mind of John Chamberlain’s familiar work, which is composed of actual auto-body salvage welded and riveted together into abstract, polychromed (and just plain chromed) forms. But the tension between public form and highly personal content in “Unpainted Sculpture” seems more Andy Warhol than Chamberlain in lineage, recalling the Pop artist’s powerful disaster paintings of the mid-1960s.

After Ray’s lengthy hiatus from the local scene, “Unpainted Sculpture” is further evidence of an astonishingly gifted artist continuing to work at the peak of his powers. Fasten your seat belts for the forthcoming mid-career survey of Ray’s sculpture organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art, set to open at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art in June and coming to MOCA the following November.

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* Regen Projects, 629 N. Almont Drive, (310) 276-5424, through Nov. 29. Closed Sundays and Mondays.