Pia Pizzo’s Love of Books Is Not Bound by Categories

At some level, it’s fair to say that every person who visits an art exhibition sees a different show. The notion seems particularly important when viewing the Long Beach Museum of Art’s current exhibition, “Pia Pizzo: Silent Journey.”

In some 50 examples, the survey samples the opus of an artist born in Italy in 1937. Pizzo had a productive career abroad, but the show concentrates on work made after she settled in Long Beach in 1980.

Before that, among other things, she worked in London designing commercial children’s books. During her own childhood, she innocently filched a copy of the Vedic classic “Upanishad” from her grandfather’s library. Something about the metaphysical text fascinated her. Undaunted by the fact that she couldn’t read a word, she studied it assiduously for five years.

No great wonder then that she wound up making unreadable artist’s books. “The Book of Harmony and Energy” provides a characteristic example. It consists of three large framed pages, one each in black, red and gold. One bears something that looks like writing but turns out to be indecipherable characters apparently sewn with thread into the paper. Another page approximates writing by stacking horizontally torn paper edges making pseudo-paragraphs of wavy lines. The third sheet bears elementary configurations of a circle, square and triangle, then overlaps them into what might be an occult symbol.

No one accustomed to looking at art will be dismayed by this work’s lack of legibility. Pizzo simply heightens the effect by linking it specifically to a book format. Strips of copper in “Revelation” suggest an evolution from early writing on clay tablets to Braille and computer boards. If you spent enough time decoding you’d probably divine a meaning, but it would be derived from a language of your own invention. In short, Pizzo reminds us that art opens oneself to oneself.

One notices that quite a few of Pizzo’s works aren’t books unless you think of them that way. “The Book of the Time of the Great Transition” is very nice, but it’s an assemblage. So is “Angels,” which seems to mourn a loss of nostalgia. The artist is free to think of framed works as book pages, but they look a lot like watercolors with text. This time, they’re legible if you read Italian and have a magnifying glass.

Displayed as art, these pieces derive their greatest energy from staying small and compressed. Larger works, such as “Homage to Berlioz,” lose concentration and appear scattered, albeit decorative. Of course, viewed as humongous tomes, they’re pretty impressive.

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* Long Beach Museum of Art, 2300 E. Ocean Blvd.; through Sept. 13, closed Mondays and Tuesdays; (562) 439-2119.