Out of the Fold

Here are a few things we know about the artist known simply as Reinhart: He works wonders with paper, possesses a fastidious sense of design and alludes to architecture and larger-scale sculpture with his tiny, tidy works. And he has an impish sense of humor that winks at you now and again.

His works have been collected by the rich and famous and have made their way into the greeting card trade. This month, you can see a good sampler of the original work by this German-born artist, who is based in Ojai, and it’s an impressive, slightly offbeat sight. Seemingly contradictory instincts add up to a happily, wildly diverse exhibition, veering from pure, abstract designs to realistic tableaux to silly visual jokes.

The best stuff triggers wonder, of the “how-did-he-do-that?” variety. Like an artist adept at his personalized origami and virtuosic paper airplane wizardry, Reinhart folds paper in ways unimaginable to most people.

The tour de force in this selection is “Recording at RCA 1949,” a casting of a remarkable original paper piece. It was fashioned after a photograph of the classical musicians Heifetz, Rubinstein and Piatigorsky recording in the studio. Meticulously modeled and set into a shallow three-dimensional space, made to appear deeper via visual spatial manipulations, the scene appears like a frozen memory, rendered mysterious and given a dream-like clarity by its stark whiteness.

In another ode to art-making, he shows a fine, all-white portrait of Beatrice Wood, the late, ever-young matriarch of the Ojai art scene. In this medium, suggesting a softer version of plaster, Wood appears ethereal, her features fading into white.

Greeting card sensibilities, with the attendant easy humor, show up in pieces like “Eggs Benedictus,” in which a chick emerges from a cracked egg, fleeing from the prospect of a frying pan. Another shameless pun-driven work, “The Sting Quartet,” finds a minuscule quartet of musician bees, the cellist baring humanoid breasts, to the delight of the bug-eyed second violinist.

Pattern-based pieces rely on echoing fields of shapes and gestures in gently folded paper that cast rippling, rhythmic shadows. By contrast, “Triangles Under Tension” is an atypically rough-hewn piece with ragged-edged triangles torn from white paper, drawn into an apparent tug-of-war vignette.

Often, Reinhart spins off playful variations on the symmetry and quest for order inherent in his art. Formal elements take center stage in the precariously balanced shapes of “Hook” and “Sliced Tower” or the heaving arcs of “Tango.” Architectural ideas, articulated in minute, paper form, find expression in “Fragmented Cube” and other models, small enough to fit in a briefcase, but potentially grand in scale.

In “Cascade” and “Square Spiral,” fastidiously cut-out strips of paper reveal hints of the color beneath the stubbornly white surfaces. It’s as though the artist, aware of his own love of clean, white paper and its unexplored properties, offers ironic self-references, to let us know that he knows that we know about his leanings.

Reinhart’s show of work is eye-catching, to be sure, even as it presents a meandering variety of aesthetic directions. On paper--and in paper--the artist creates his own world of possibilities.

DETAILS

Reinhart, through August at the Ojai Center for the Arts, 113 S. Montgomery St., Ojai. Gallery hours: 10 a.m.-4 p.m., Tue.-Sun.; 646-0117.