Art Review

Back and Forth: For the past 17 years, Albert Oehlen has been exhibiting paintings that give with one hand and take away with the other. At Margo Leavin Gallery, two new bodies of work continue to act out a strategy set up to go nowhere.

Nearly three years ago, Oehlen’s last show in Los Angeles included six hand-painted abstractions and three computer-generated diagrams that were transferred to canvas by silk-screen, and then spruced up with a little brushwork.

Half of his recent paintings resemble a fusion of these two bodies of work. Each new piece consists of smears and lines of paint Oehlen has brushed and sprayed over collaged imagery that has been transferred to canvas by the type of gigantic inkjet printers used to manufacture billboards.

Crisper and more linear than Oehlen’s previous oils and enamels, these overblown doodles are also messier and more free-form than his earlier computer-generated works. They could be characterized as open and lyrical if they weren’t so intentionally and aggressively ugly.

The other half of Oehlen’s exhibition consists of five considerably smaller oils-on-canvas, painted in a palette of rich, sensuous grays. Most of these works resemble well-used schoolroom blackboards, whose imagery has been erased and redrawn so many times that only ghostly traces and smudged halos remain.

As a whole, Oehlen’s exhibition seems to say: I’ll give you bright colors and high-tech imagery, but only with remedial graffiti and incoherent patterning. Or: I’ll give you impressive brushwork and juicy painterly maneuvers, but only in black-and-white and obscured by erasure-like skids.

The back-and-forth ambivalence that drives Oehlen’s art also diminishes its impact. As if paralyzed by the prospect of being mistaken for beautiful objects that might get viewers to fall for them, all of his works turn in on themselves and cancel out their best features. As a result, they fall into a well-established pattern of mannered avant-gardism, in which the safety of pure negativity replaces the risk of making a painting that doesn’t hedge its bets at every turn.

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* Margo Leavin Gallery, 812 N. Robertson Blvd., (310) 273-0603, through May 23. Closed Sundays and Mondays.