The Enduring Puzzlement of Huerta’s People

Salomon Huerta’s new paintings so insistently turn the other cheek that they immediately confront you with the fact that they’re nonconfrontational. Profoundly ambivalent about their own presence in a lily-white art gallery, these emotionally loaded portraits of anonymous individuals play an edgy, passive-aggressive game, in which the act of looking at someone or something circles back on itself to include the viewer in a charged drama whose outcome is anything but clear-cut.

At Patricia Faure Gallery, five panels, each the size of a full-length mirror, depict a solitary man or woman standing with his or her back turned to you. Stiffly posed before monochromatic backdrops that have been lovingly painted in a vaguely institutional palette of dull green, crisp blue, dirty ivory or faded pink, Huerta’s subjects appear to have one foot firmly planted in the world of mug shots and the other in that of Renaissance portraiture.

Each of his faceless people is dressed in nondescript clothing that looks as if it’s been freshly laundered. Their collarless shirts, crisply pressed trousers and black work boots could be institutionally issued or chosen for the generic, I-don’t-want-to-stand-out-from-the-crowd quality that defines a large part of contemporary urban life.

Their postures embody vulnerability and defiance. With feet at shoulder width or with heels together--as if at military attention--these prosaic people convey both a sense of up-against-the-wall entrapment and this-is-where-I-stand desperation.

Likewise, their cleanly shaven or closely cropped heads reveal the shapes of their young skulls and any scars that would otherwise be hidden by full heads of hair. By eliminating one potentially distinguishing characteristic, Huerta’s figures show that there’s power in anonymity. They also embody a language in which subtle distinctions can be made, even if outsiders often can’t read them.

Eight approximately 1-foot-squared panels, hung at eye level, depict only the heads and necks of similar sitters, seen directly from behind or in reversed three-quarter profile. Like Kurt Kauper’s life-size portraits of imaginary opera divas and Monica Majoli’s haunting close-ups of agitated flesh, Huerta’s small paintings infuse the rigors of formalism with a peculiar take on the politics of identity.

Neither straightforward in their celebrations of self, nor willing to leave subjectivity out of the picture, his almost perfectly symmetrical images have the presence of religious icons. Like all devotional imagery, Huerta’s paintings invite responses that resonate well beyond the physical.

* Patricia Faure Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 449-1479, through Nov. 28. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Jabs and Stabs: At Manny Silverman Gallery, a well-selected survey of paintings and works on paper by Philip Guston (1913-1980) provides a stunning thumbnail sketch of the painter’s dramatic shift, in the 1960s, from gestural abstraction to comic-book-inspired figuration. On equal footing with the best artists of his impressive generation, Guston could pack loads of emotional punch in a diminutive painting. Despite its modest size--13 paintings and 11 drawings--this concise overview never feels sketchy or skeletal, but lays out the meaty, all-thumbs quality of his best works, whether abstract or figurative.

The show opens with an untitled abstraction from 1951-52. A field of soft tans, grays and off-whites, its amorphous surface is interrupted by some smudged brushwork and a few jolts of incendiary red, orange, gold, yellow and pink.

These drifting, incipient elements congeal in a series of four fierce little paintings from 1957-59. Lined up on one wall of the main gallery, they are dominated by ominous black forms whose brutal, knife-like brush strokes match the rudimentary vigor of their jagged contours. To scan these panels from left to right is to feel as if you’re watching an animated sequence in which some crude life form bubbles to the surface.

The largest painting forms the pivot where the exhibition shifts from abstraction to figuration. “Afternoon” (1964) is a restrained force-field of grays, blacks and pinks in which each brush stroke has the substance and solidity of a figure. Cleaner and tighter than Guston’s earlier abstractions, this canvas has the presence of a picture: Less gestural than before, its marks seem more representational than expressive.

In the next five paintings, fleshy reds and bubble gum pinks dominate Guston’s palette as comic-strip imagery takes over his compositions. Hooded thugs chomp on cigars as they hide behind a brick wall in an untitled image from 1971. A pair of panels mutely inventories the painter’s studio, suggesting that although everything is in place, the will to act cannot be mustered.

The show-stopping standout is “Pink Sea” (1978), a seething stew of futility in which individual ambition ends up in a rain-soaked rubbish heap, strewn with tattered shoes, dismembered limbs and the heads of more than one wide-eyed Cyclops. Self-pity has never looked so deadly.

In all of these works, the paint does not seem to have been brushed on, but appears as if it has been applied in nasty jabs and angry stabs. With a great economy of means, Guston thus loads his simple images and basic composition with malignant forcefulness.

* Manny Silverman Gallery, 619 N. Almont Drive, (310) 659-8256, through Dec. 19. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Playful: At Ruth Bachofner Gallery, two groups of paintings by Karl Benjamin show the veteran Los Angeles abstractionist to be a individualist whose idiosyncratic canvases have been marching to the beat of their own drummer since the early 1950s. At their best, these nifty, off-balanced images change their pace, rhythm and tempo without missing a beat.

In the rear gallery, eight modestly scaled paintings made between 1954 and 1958 look as if they belong to six different bodies of work--each as fully resolved as any other. Although all include the crisp contours, weird tertiary colors and meticulously finished surfaces for which the 73-year-old artist is known, their similarities end there.

The earliest one is a tilted cityscape that negotiates an uneasy compromise between Piet Mondrian’s mature works and John McLaughlin’s early still lifes. Another tightly compressed painting, measuring only 4 1/2 inches wide, is a thin slice of an image in which symbolism reigns. In contrast, “Growing Forms” conveys the sensation of underwater weightlessness, as if it were made of musical notes that had melted into floating protoplasmic squiggles.

For their part, “Yellow Sky” and “Organic Forms-Ochre” resemble stylized landscapes that are as groovy as anything from the 1960s. Harsher and more rigorously ordered, another pair of paintings is built of sharply angled fragments that interlock like jigsaw puzzle pieces.

The oddball among this odd constellation is “Grey Planes.” Recalling faux stonework, this image forges an essential link between Benjamin’s art and the simplified shapes of Modernist design, whose streamlined stylishness embraces a similar sort of optimistic efficiency.

In the main gallery, eight generally larger paintings made between 1990 and 1995 appear to belong to five distinct bodies of work. One of the jauntiest fuses the centralized solidity of Joseph Albers’ color studies with the out-of-sync unevenness of McLaughlin’s mature works. A trio of canvases, in which spatial depth is articulated more insistently than before, calls to mind kaleidoscopic patterns.

The palette of Benjamin’s paintings from the 1990s is more keyed up than that of his earlier works, if not quite as loopy. His recent abstractions are also more playful, expansive and jumpy, if less idiosyncratic than before. This has less to do with the artist losing his sense of adventure than with the rest of the world catching up with his outlandish colors and out-of-this-world approach to painting.

* Ruth Bachofner Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 829-3300, through Nov. 21. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Strange Light: Maxi Cohen’s photographs of rooms lit by television sets make everyday life look as if it’s as splashy and glamorous as a lavish magazine advertisement. Shot at night, from outside diners, motel rooms, apartments and houses, these sumptuous pictures are long on style and short on substance. Each seems to strive only to surpass the superficial shimmer of the last.

At the new Sandroni Rey Gallery, viewers are left out in the cold. If a narrative fragment begins to draw you into the glowing, light-drenched world depicted by Cohen’s thin, technically proficient pictures, it is soon swamped by their willingness to sacrifice story to pure production value.

Composed with one eye on the shadowy dramatics of film noir, and the other winking at the backdrops of big-budget print advertisements, these artsy prints are most notable for their exploitation of recent advancements in printing technology. Most are large, the biggest measuring 4 by 6 feet. All are vividly colored, crystal-clear Cibachromes mounted on aluminum panels. Coated with a high-gloss finish, their slick surfaces do not need to be protected by glass.

Almost any image printed with these materials and techniques would immediately grab your eye. The problem with Cohen’s blandly attractive photographs is that once they get your attention they don’t do much with it.

* Sandroni Rey Gallery, 1224 Abbot Kinney Blvd., Venice, (310) 392-3404, through Dec. 19. Closed Sundays and Mondays.