McCleary Paintings Capture Hidden Lives

Dan McCleary’s paintings of people doing everyday things give shape to the interior worlds we live in when we’re not really paying attention to what’s going on around us. At Kohn Turner Gallery, a new group of studies on paper and oils on canvas features eight fairly large pictures that vary in their capacity to evoke the presence of inner lives simmering just beneath surface appearances.

Sometimes a blank stare is just a blank stare; at other times such slack-jawed unself-consciousness accompanies moments of intense self-absorption. Every one of McCleary’s paintings walks a fine line between boredom and imaginative transport.

Some seem to depict nothing more than a person going through the motions of his/her job’s uninspired duties, as if operating on autopilot. Others suggest the presence of charged psychological states, whose poignancy can be read in a tilted head, furrowed brow, pair of pursed lips or slumped shoulders.

McCleary is at his best when his pictures don’t seem forced or burdened by the desire to drive home a specific point. In one plainly Vermeer-like composition, a well-dressed man reviews his notes in a generic restroom before making a public presentation. In another, a woman in a museum attentively studies a sculpture while reading a guidebook she holds like a hymnal. Painted in profile, these approximately life-size figures embody a sense of concentration that makes them oblivious to their surroundings.

Even stronger in their evocation of the distance between people are two paintings of a talk-show host and his guests. In these images, McCleary monumentalizes awkward pauses in the conversation to suggest that although each of these people occupies the same stage, their interactions are so painfully stilted that they may as well be living in different universes.

Less successful in the attempt to make such hidden tensions palpable is a painting of a woman visiting an incarcerated man and a canvas that depicts a stiff-lipped businessman watching a woman collect her thoughts before performing a peep show. Too literal in their illustration of the psychological buffer zones modern city-dwellers regularly insert between themselves and the world, these two works reveal that McCleary’s talents are best served by subtlety and indirection. His is an art in which whispers convey much more than shouts.

*

* Kohn Turner Gallery, 454 N. Robertson Blvd., (310) 854-5400, through Nov. 28. Closed Sundays and Mondays.