Baron’s Work Celebrates Spirit of Survival

Hannelore Baron declared late in her life that she didn’t want her art to be regarded only as the manifestation of her childhood trauma. She had been one of millions of persecuted Jews in Nazi Europe. As it turned out, Baron had even more suffering in store for her after immigrating to the U.S. in 1941 at the age of 15. Afflicted by claustrophobia, she had three nervous breakdowns and several major operations before dying of cancer in 1987. Suffering, both physical and psychological, may have characterized her life, but what suffuses her art is the spirit of survival, pained but persistent.

To paraphrase Elie Wiesel, it’s not only the trauma that matters, but the response to the trauma. Baron’s collages, prints and box constructions, now on view at Manny Silverman Gallery, are eloquent responses to a more than difficult life. They are delicate and tough, their surfaces like skin--easily bruised, distressed and scarred, but adamantly alive, testaments to endurance.

Collage, by definition a synthesis of diverse parts, was a natural vehicle for Baron’s own syncretic tendencies, as well as her spiritual and material resourcefulness. She began working in the medium in 1960. The late works on view here (from 1978-86) all adhere to the same basic format of irregular rectangles of cloth and paper pieced together in a loose mosaic, and marked with raw, pictographic observations of figures, cats and birds, or obscure inked notations resembling numbers and letters.

Every element suggests the hand, use or memory, from the handmade papers with their visible fiber to the fragments of patterned cloth, yellowed from age and harking back inescapably to Baron’s early memories of her parents’ fabric business in Germany. The colors, like the textures, feel earthen and worn, muted by age.

Baron’s materials allude to natural erosion imposed by time, but also, especially in the small reliquary-like wood constructions, to a sort of suppression or containment of the body inflicted by force. The wood she uses is not just weathered but charred, and often bound by knotted wire or cord, or pierced by rusted nails.

In a lovely little series of monoprints, Baron made impressions of small copper cutouts of animals and figures that she had wrapped in copper wire or string to evoke mummies and sacred effigies. But that quietly daunting sacredness mutates, in the wood assemblages, into a palpable brutality--that from which the survivor is delivered.

* Manny Silverman Gallery, 619 N. Almont Drive, (310) 659-8256, through May 16. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Patch Work: Garret Keith’s “paintings” at Newspace are transparent and so, in a way, are his motives: to playfully undermine the rules, assumptions and processes of painting itself. His work is composed of paint on a flat support hanging on the wall, yet he never puts brush to canvas.

What he does is stretch clear vinyl over stretcher bars and arrange upon it horizontal and vertical trails of paint samples, those paper strips with several gradations of a given hue. Several other works are made by stapling together clear or colored patches of vinyl into circles or rectangles.

What else do we expect from painting that Keith supplies, but not in the conventional way? Meaning. Here, meaning is not gleaned from either narrative content or the interplay of forms, but is flatly announced, ready-made, in the strung-together names of the individual colors on the sample sheets.

A coy kind of automatic poetry results from this accretion of ad-speak, in which significance is inflated to a disproportionately high emotional pitch. A warm white becomes “Fresh Popcorn”; a dark blue, “Romantic Knight”; a pale green, “Niagara Falls.” We are spoon-fed associations that engage the senses and memory, but cheaply, programmatically.

Keith is less a composer of original tunes than a conductor of preexisting ones; but that, too, bears meaning as a Postmodern predicament. His work stays fresh and clever only briefly, for such cynical humor can’t always survive the cynical responses it invites.

* Newspace, 5241 Melrose Ave., (213) 469-9353, through Saturday. Closed Mondays.