Art Review

Menacing Clowns: At a circus, a clown or two can add a poignant touch of melancholy to an otherwise thrilling show. At an art gallery, 26 clowns are more than enough to give you the chills.

At Louis Stern Fine Arts, Peter Zokosky’s impressive exhibition of imaginary clown portraits takes the second tactic, exaggerating to operatic proportions the uneasiness clowns cause in adults. If this overwhelming group of smaller-than-lifesize paintings doesn’t compel you to run from the room, it will play tug-of-war with your heartstrings, triggering considerable pain as you’re torn between feeling that these unsavory characters are menacing or pitiable. Whether they merit disdain or deserve deep sympathy is a question only you can answer.

Each clown’s name begins with a different letter of the alphabet. Zokosky’s collection shows bald, generally old men who wear colorful costumes and gobs of face paint. They also wear a nearly encyclopedic range of expressions on their well-worn faces.

Ajax looks like a dimwitted bellhop who no longer strives to please his guests, but just tries to avoid being punished for their inevitable complaints. Billy appears to be an escapee from a Diane Arbus photograph: a grinning patient who does what he’s told but doesn’t know why.

And Casper resembles a man who hasn’t left his dingy apartment (or had a visitor) for more than a decade.

And that’s only the beginning. Every one of Zokosky’s performers is so loaded with complex, often contradictory qualities that it’s hard to pull your eyes from them. Sherbet’s beatific smile masks real suffering but is all the more beautiful for its hard-won wisdom. Nit could be an amiable idiot, if not for his resemblance to John Wayne Gacy.

As a group, Zokosky’s portraits begin with one of the most cliched and debased genres of painting, and reclaim for this art a range of emotions that had been lost to television newscasts, comic strips and cartoons. Xylo, Yap and Zero could be the Three Stooges, caught in peculiarly philosophical moments of self-doubt and reflection. Harelip’s lovable plumpness recalls Uncle Fester from the Addams Family; Ino’s poker-faced solemnity echoes the demeanor of Zippy the Pinhead; and Ultimo evokes Mr. Freeze, who tormented Batman and Robin with his villainous schemes.

Zokosky’s portraits take shape in the space between the various faces we present to the world and what lies behind such manipulated visages. Titled “Clown,” his first solo show in seven years casts the artist himself as a clown--an unfashionable joker who uses seemingly outdated means to get viewers to look long and hard at the tragicomic drama of what it means to be human in an often inhuman world.

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* Louis Stern Fine Arts, 9002 Melrose Ave., (310) 276-0147, through June 20. Closed Sundays and Mondays.