Kahn’s Works Keeps Viewers at a Distance

Tobi Kahn’s paintings of abstract landscapes and tabletop sculptures of shrine-like enclosures create an experience of profound stillness. But serenity and stasis are not the same thing.

Unfortunately for viewers, the New York-based artist’s exhibition at the Skirball Cultural Center conveys less the tranquillity many people feel before beautiful landscapes and meditative shrines than the rigor mortis of an outdated style whose potential to articulate meaning remains untapped.

Although Peter Selz, the survey’s guest curator, has selected 43 paintings and 19 sculptures made almost every year from 1981 to 1995, very little develops or evolves in Kahn’s plodding oeuvre. From the earliest architectural sculptures to the most recent painted panels, the fastidiously worked surfaces of both media remain the same: layers of modeling paste into which powdery acrylic pigment has been uniformly mixed.

Methodically applied with a small palette knife, these viscous, variously colored mixtures have dried to form rigid, impenetrable shells. Kahn has then finished the plaster-like surfaces with a coat of dark varnish, shrouding some parts of each piece in shadowy blackness while accenting others with highlights. The finishes of some works seem crusty, while others appear to be covered with rust.

The artist’s trademark technique causes his toy-size temples to have the presence of weathered buildings or recently dug-up icons. It is, however, less successful when applied to canvas. Kahn’s abstract images lack a lively, this is it immediacy. They do not seem to be paintings so much as death masks of paintings, somber memorials undertaken to remind viewers of lives lived elsewhere.

Titled “Metamorphoses,” the nationally traveling exhibition appears to be more about past transformations than present change. The most significant evolution that takes place in the 15-year survey occurs between 1988 and 1989, when Kahn stopped enclosing his paintings in simple wooden frames. The images in his newer, frameless works wrap around each panel’s edges, suggesting that these abstract pictures are thick, weighty planks of color and shape, which, like wood grain, run all the way through.

*

About the same time, Kahn’s imagery shifted away from the depiction of simplified landscapes--sometimes composed of no more than two shapes, in two tones of the same color--to more detailed close-ups of more complicated forms. “Lyje,” for example, vaguely recalls a flower blossoming in front of a tree’s towering trunk.

But the scale, placement and coloration of its nine darkly outlined shapes prevent it from resolving into an identifiable picture. Similarly, paintings like “Luzzan,” “Yyshaar” and “Ohalim” (all of Kahn’s works are titled with words he invented) bear such a tenuous relationship to the visible world that they at least deliver an appealing sense of mystery.

In contrast, most of his recent images circle back to the stylized canyons, silhouetted mountains, natural arches and calm waterways that appear in his earliest works, whose interlocked components echo the tidy finality of completed jigsaw puzzles.

Resembling either magnified views of microorganisms or topographical maps of meandering coastlines made up of island-studded inlets, Kahn’s recent paintings keep viewers at a distance because nearly all of their ambiguity has been restricted to an either/or alternative. This places too great a limitation on an overly generic format.

Likewise, his clunky little shrines invite intimacy only to deny its involvement. You come in close to these doll-house-sized structures, each of which shelters a crudely carved figurine, only to be put off by their cliched layouts, which look like a bland version of Postmodern architecture’s overly stylized hybridizations.

Kahn’s works are accessible but ungenerous. Rather than drawing energy from them, viewers are forced to do most of the work, projecting ideas and intentions onto their mute surfaces. The dynamic back-and-forth exchanges that take place when art really works is flattened into an unreciprocated expenditure of energy.

Ultimately, the goal of Kahn’s art is to evoke mystery while remaining distant from it. Walking such a self-imposed tightrope could be exciting, if viewers were not kept at so great a distance that we are insulated from the risks and the thrills of the artist’s self-enclosed quest.

*

* “Metamorphoses,” Skirball Cultural Center, 2701 Sepulveda Blvd., (310) 440-4500, through Aug. 26. Closed Mondays. Admission, $8.