Gonzalez Offers Constructive Perspective

At Christopher Grimes Gallery, Michael Gonzalez presents a new body of work that hums along at an exceptionally refined pitch. It’s hard to know just what to call Gonzalez’s work. It’s flat and hangs on the wall, but it’s not painting. It engages actual space with solid materials, but it isn’t sculpture. It’s assembled from layered cutouts, but it isn’t collage. Call these curiosities Pop Constructions.

Constructivist sculpture of the 1910s and ‘20s has had a profound and far-reaching effect on contemporary art, but it’s hard to imagine a quirkier, more enchanting, surprising and eccentric extension of that tradition than Gonzalez’s work. For a dozen years, the 45-year-old San Bernardino native has been showing small, physically unassuming, three-dimensional objects that rejigger Constructivism through a disconcerting yet buoyant Pop lens.

The 18 works in the current show are from a series called “Themeplex.” The terrifically pungent title suggests the playful ambience of an amusement park, while also conjuring the complexly interconnected arrangement of parts around which each work is constructed.

All 18 Pop Constructions share a single format. Four sheets of clear plexiglass, 17 inches high and 14 inches wide, are held together by aluminum screws and bolts. Suspended from small S-hooks, each work stands away from the wall perhaps a half-inch.

Sandwiched between the plexiglass sheets are clusters of colored circles, which have been scissored from plastic bags commercially manufactured for sales of Wonder English muffins. The clusters, each composed in a little kaleidoscopic pattern, are arrayed in a grid--three across, four down. In two works, a single pattern is repeated over and over; in the rest, all the patterns are different, suggesting an infinite array of possible permutations.

Each work recalls a glass specimen slide, a set of molecular compounds or perhaps some sort of electrical or genetic diagram. Lined up around the room, these concisely ordered constructions give the show the look of an odd scientific or medical display. The translucence of the colored dots, coupled with the layered transparency of the plexiglass sheets and the shallow distance from the wall, which allows light to freely circulate, yields remarkably deep levels of shifting optical space.

Constructivist art originally put industrial materials like glass, cardboard, metal and plastic into radical configurations. Emblematic of a newly emergent technological age, sculpture’s traditional concern with physical mass was shifted toward an emphasis on spatial dynamics. Gonzalez’s evanescent work does, too--but with a difference: The Pop aura creates a late-20th century dynamic of imaginative space.

How could something so lyrically beautiful be fabricated from such stunningly modest means? Gonzalez updates Vladimir Tatlin (1885-1953), the artist who formulated the original Constructivist working principle of “truth to materials”: He coaxes an authentic sense of wonder from ersatz Wonder bread materials. There’s no utopian yearning embedded within this consistently remarkable work, just a refreshingly pragmatic, revivified poetics of the everyday.

* Christopher Grimes Gallery, 916 Colorado Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 587-3373, through June 20. Closed Sundays and Mondays.