Filling In the Pieces of Dzama’s Drawings

Every one of the 500 page-size drawings that make up Marcel Dzama’s L.A. solo debut at Richard Heller Gallery looks as if it belongs to an unfinished children’s book, aborted not because it depicted events too grim for kids but because the artist himself had no idea where the narrative was going.

Rather than being a drawback, this sense of unfinished business is one of the best things about Dzama’s art. Like incomplete storyboards or figurative Rorschach blots, these tidy little pictures draw viewers in by getting us to invent scenarios that make sense of the moments depicted. You’re free to fill in the “befores” and “afters” to the “nows” they outline.

The young, Winnipeg-based artist provides enough raw material to satisfy a wide range of appetites and fantasies. Although characters and themes are repeated in various images, no two can be arranged sequentially to form a sustained story, as a comic book would.

In several drawings, a nondescript man wears an alligator costume and a thoughtful expression on his face--as if Halloween parties and existential philosophy were two sides of the same coin. Again and again, long-legged women dressed like Captain America show up: one milks a cow, a couple of others chat and a few spring from the ground like flowers. Gunslingers, pilots and mad scientists, as well as amputees, maitre d’s and gangsters also play major roles in Dzama’s eccentric pictures.

Animals, both imaginary and real, appear in many images, often looking more perceptive and sentient than the humans they accompany. In one, a cat with a wise face listens serenely to a song on the radio. In another, three brown bears play catch with a green-tinted one. All four look inscrutable.

Nearly all of Dzama’s drawings depict two or more characters whose interactions have reached a physical or emotional climax. With creepy consistency, life-shattering events are treated as run-of-the-mill occurrences, experiences that we grow accustomed to because we have no other choice.

Like Samuel Beckett’s tragicomic dramas, which are at once hilarious and dreadful, Dzama’s one-act images simultaneously haunt and entertain. Their carefully rendered figures, who often seem lost on otherwise blank pages, embody a sweetly demented sensibility that is both charming and dark.

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* Richard Heller Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 453-9191, through Feb. 7. Closed Sundays and Mondays.