Strengths and Limitations

With Manuel Neri’s early work at the Orange County Museum of Art and a selection of paintings by longtime still-life artist Paul Wonner at the Art Institute of Southern California, the local art scene has suddenly acquired a Bay Area Figurative flavor.

There’s a world of difference between the two artists, however.

Neri, born in 1930, was nurtured by the ‘50s Funk aesthetic that glorified crude materials and impulsive execution. His mature work is extraordinarily tactile, improvisatory and full-bodied; the plaster sculptures for which he is best known gain much of their evocativeness through a refusal to come down firmly on the side of either abstraction or figuration.

Wonner, a decade older, worked his way through a painterly style of figuration influenced both by the gestural styles of the New York School, which he absorbed during a late-’40s sojourn in Manhattan, and the work of such Bay Area stalwarts as David Park and Elmer Bischoff.

Still, in the late ‘60s, when minimalism ruled (and even Neri flirted with geometric sculptural form), Wonner rethought his style.

Long intrigued by 17th century Dutch still lifes, he began to paint spare, pristine compositions of flowers, fruit and household objects evenly scattered on a floor or tabletop, in which there is no trace of the brush.

In ensuing decades, Wonner would become known for his brightly lighted surfaces and whitened color as well as for a batch of idiosyncratic motifs and methods.

The small group of paintings at the Art Institute--which date from the late ‘70s through the ‘90s--reveals the strengths and limitations of his style and its recent shifts of focus.

Each object Wonner selects has a specific role to play on the bright surface of his canvas stage.

Most obvious are the art tools (pencils, mostly, often angled to imitate the imaginary orthogonals of linear perspective) and the representations of Old Master painting reproductions (postcards, books and posters).

Wonner self-consciously employs these to emphasize his role and lineage in the production and history of art. Persuasively reproducing a 17th century Dutch still life on a tiny bit of canvas is also, of course, a technical tour de force.

Some objects (the assortment of tomato cans, liquor bottles and the like pressed into service as vases) seem chosen to suggest a bohemian rakishness--a feeling at odds with the careful plotting of the composition. Other elements recall the artist’s private life: a piece of jewelry, a hotel ashtray.

Eccentric groupings (such as the pencil, apple and orange lined up like a fragment of Morse code in “Flowers, Art Book and Red Chair,” 1991) perpetuate Wonner’s typically staccato visual rhythms.

The cut flowers are traditional emblems of the brevity of earthly life, though Wonner also paints potted plants, as if to hedge his bets.

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Lone pieces of fruit sometimes suggest a feeling of isolation--a theme that drones softly underneath these still lifes. Inscribed in tiny letters on “Dutch Still Life With Plants and Butterfly Book,” from 1979, a poem by Emily Dickenson (whose choppy rhythms are intriguingly akin to Wonner’s) evokes a busy natural world in which “No notice--was--to me.”

By representing banal objects with a coolly analytical, almost game-like strategy, Wonner broke decisively with the moody realism of the other Bay Area Figurative painters. But despite, or perhaps because of, the fine-tuned sensibility of his work, there is something disconcertingly arid and mannered about it.

Interestingly, before Wonner began teaching painting at several UC campuses and other schools, he worked as a package designer in New York and as a library cataloger at UC Davis. The skills involved in these jobs--the conceptual flair, the attention to layout and detail--can be seen in the tight, even downright fussy schemes of the paintings.

Wonner’s peculiar strength was always the airless quality of space in his work and the jumpy rhythm of scattered objects.

In recent years, these features have been replaced by increasingly crowded and banal compositions of larger objects. In “Flower Painting With a Wooden Box and Pencils,” insistent rows of verticals formed by tall stems have a cloying feel, and a big window extends the space of the painting to an adjoining garden, casting a pall of ordinariness over what once was a distinctive vision.

It may be that the recent developments reflect a mellowness of spirit on Wonner’s part. Still, it is the neurotic sense of prickly solitude and fanatic ordering that gives Wonner’s best work its quiet edge.

* “Paul Wonner: Still Lifes,” through Feb. 12, Art Institute of Southern California, 2222 Laguna Canyon Road, Laguna Beach. Free. 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Monday-Friday; 9 a.m.-4 p.m. Saturday. (714) 376-6000.