Art Review

Lovely Splotches: Rudolf Stingel’s enticing new works on paper at Margo Leavin Gallery have an undeniably seductive pull, one that belies their resolutely anti-Romantic origins. These metallic abstractions look like splotches, stains or distant topographies floating against white backgrounds, and they’re casually thumbtacked to the gallery walls like featureless maps to anywhere and nowhere.

The rusty reds, bilge greens and blue-black colors of these paintings recall industrial residue. But, in contrast to such noxious material associations, the visual effect of these shimmering swatches of color verges on the sublime. When you walk past the works in the main gallery, the color tones shift, glimmer and deepen slightly, changing from silvery blue to gray to black as the recessive color interacts with the reflective surface layer, creating a subtle sense of movement beneath each stratum of color.

In the past, Stingel has attempted to deflate hallowed notions about the artist’s “signature” imprint on a work of art by revealing the not-so-secret formula that he uses to create his paintings. Stingel applies an even coat of paint across a section of his canvas or paper, lays a section of mesh netting on top and uses an air gun to spray a second layer of silver paint over the netting, which is then peeled off. Although created in a serialized manner, each piece is unique, its dimpled and creased surface recalling wrinkled folds of skin.

By divulging his recipe, Stingel encourages us to think about art’s commodity function, as well as its relationship to industrial culture. In the past, he displayed his paintings in rooms covered with garish magenta and pink-striped wall-to-wall carpeting, which destroyed the pristine white cube of the gallery space and playfully trumped Minimalism’s reductive approach to pattern and color. Here, however, his works are shown without any such distractions, suggesting that, like Dr. Frankenstein, Stingel has been forced to reckon with the undeniable power and beauty of his own mechanistic creations.

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* Margo Leavin Gallery, 812 N. Robertson Blvd., West Hollywood, (310) 273-0603, through Aug. 22. Closed Sundays and Mondays.