Show Offers Modern Perspective Into Italy’s Art-History Past

A poll naming Italy as the Earth’s most beloved country would come as no surprise. Chockablock with great art, robust food and gorgeous people, even the ancient nation’s endemic inefficiency is finally endearing. For centuries artists made pilgrimages to quaff its classical past. They still do; witness Loyola Marymount’s exhibition, “Contempo-Italianate: Contemporary Artists Reflect on Italy.”

Guest curators Barbara Strassen and Mary-Kay Lombino concocted the show aided by gallery director Gordon L. Fuglie. They assembled a band of 18 American artists inspired by this cradle of Western Civ. Today, however, they bring back impressions taken at an amused distance from history.

Patrick Hughes, for instance, is clearly aware that Renaissance perspective is essentially Italian. At a glance, his “Ebb and Flow” looks like a conventional, poster-style painting of a rather corny stage set. A yellow loggia resting on a checkerboard floor overlooks the sea. At least the rudimentary perspective seems correct. Move your head and the whole scene undulates like a mild attack of vertigo. Turns out the piece is an illusionistic relief that derails orderly perspective into collision with modern relativist Cubism.

David Ligare, not previously known as a humorist, presents “Ponte Vecchio / Torre Nova.” Impeccably neoclassical in style, the treatment of Florence’s venerable bridge is so deadpan you barely notice the anomalies. What’s an oarsman straight out of Eakins doing on the River Arno? Where did that tower come from and why is Michelangelo’s “David” in its niche?

A clue is provided by an adjacent rack of postcards reproducing the painting. Ligare plays the role of promoter, improving the bridge’s modern incarnation as a tourist attraction.

Margaret McCann’s “Weightlifter” turns a famously foreshortened image of the dead Christ into a giant jock weight-lifting Hadrian’s tomb. Ruth Weisberg updates Pompeii’s Villa of the Mysteries in an oversize drawing that makes figures look like the contemporary models they are.

Nancy Webber is up to her tirelessly compelling practice of finding real-life doubles for characters in famous paintings. The most effective here is based on Titian’s portrait of “Doge Andrea Gritti.” His contemporary reincarnation is a Los Angeles bus driver.

Much of this somewhat uneven exercise draws affectionate humor from the tension between Italy’s awesome past and its earthy everyday reality. That contradiction naturally attracts photographers. Blaise Tobia’s “Italy / Italy (Universal Symbols)” juxtaposes a street sign forbidding scanty dress with a poster appearing to advertise a model’s effectively nude behind. Stan Stembicki’s “Florence, Church of Santa Croce” wonders which is more typically Italian, a sculpture of a Baroque saint or the Vespa parked at its feet?

If the irony of some work borders on the hackneyed, there’s a wonderfully lyrical lilt to J.J. L’Heureux’s butterfly-delicate collages of cheese and fruit wrappers. The sentimentality of tiny images is rendered robust with puckery lime green and sunshine yellow. Barbara Strassen’s corner installation, “Amor Pleni, First Chapter,” mixes gently florid wallpaper and fabric patterns with snippets of Baroque ceiling motifs of cherubs, animals and satyrs, purging kitsch while keeping its energy.

The team of Susan Edwards and Antonette Rosato exercised eccentric inventiveness in replacing the shades of vintage, cheap-hotel light fixtures with reproductions of classical art. Jeffrey Vallance is noted for mail art and extended performance pieces. His “Self-Portrait Sindone” borrows the name given to researchers of the Shroud of Turin, a relic that the artist investigated while in Italy.

Vallance imitated the scholars’ practice of experimentally re-creating the shroud by covering his face with a staining liquid and pressing it into a cloth. Vallance made one with wine, the other espresso. He used a folded cloth, so the image has Rorschach symmetry. As usual, Vallance leaves the viewer to decide exactly how much irreverence is intended. The guy has more edges than a Swiss army knife.

Italian folk culture turns up in Virginia Maksymowicz’s “I Proverbi.” Four body casts of a nude female torso are accompanied with a plaque lettered with such proverbs as “A pretty woman doesn’t last.” A similar spirit inhabits an interactive computer show by the team of Stuart Bender and Angelo Funicelli.

“Contempo-Italianate” is amusing and warm-hearted, but probably includes too many artists. Those who might fare better in another context are Theodore Brown, Emmanuel Cosentino, Dominic Cretara, Jenny Okun, Mark Pally, Don Smiley, John O’Brien, Toti Mercodante and Steve Roden.

* “Contempo-Italianate: Contemporary Artists Reflect on Italy,” Loyola Marymount University, 7900 Loyola Blvd.; L.A., through Nov. 21, closed Sundays through Tuesdays, (310) 338-2880.