Discovering a Rainbow in Metalwork

Candy-colored carnage is probably not what you’re expecting to see at scrap-metal-maestro John Chamberlain’s current show at PaceWildenstein. So prepare yourself for a glimpse of what J.G. Ballard’s “Crash” might have looked like had it been orchestrated by the late Walt Disney.

Chamberlain first made art out of the wrecked fenders of a vintage Ford back in 1957; the rest, as they say, is art history. His point was both about rendering Abstract Expressionism’s drips and swaths of paint into three dimensions and about the frisson of mass production--Pop’s already hallowed turf.

Disappointingly, the years have seen this rather complex intervention calcify into a one-liner with little visual charge, despite the obvious theatrics of smashed-up car parts housed in art’s inner sanctum. Yet with this collection of 14 stainless, chromium-plated and painted steel sculptures, produced from 1989-1996, Chamberlain looks interesting again.

Technically, the work is masterful: Here, metal seems to writhe, unfurl, coil, spiral, ripple--the list goes on and on. This, however, has always been true of Chamberlain. What’s quite extraordinary are the colors of lavender, pink, lemon yellow, fuchsia, salmon and tangerine and the way their sugary sweetness perversely brings out the implied violence of the forms. The effect is of rainbow-hued disaster, a cotillion at a junkyard, or festering cotton candy.

These sculptures come in various sizes: small ones on pedestals that work like concentrated essences, large ones hanging on the wall--a bit too ponderous to be funny--and medium-sized ones poised on the floor that feel just right. Observers tend to wax poetic about these, comparing them to flowers, all abloom. I find that they look more like crumpled-up chewing-gum wrappers. Indeed, Chamberlain is more attracted to the inorganic universe than the organic one, or at least to the way they merge into each other in moments of crisis--like the car crash, as Ballard himself made clear.

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* PaceWildenstein, 9540 Wilshire Blvd., Beverly Hills, (310) 205-5522, through Saturday.