Compulsion, Power, Submission Figure Into Lebrun’s World

In the art of Rico Lebrun (1900-1964), an Italian immigrant who played an influential role in the L.A. art world of the 1940s, the human figure stands as the sun around which all the planets revolve. The glorious core of existence, this sun can be brutal and harsh as naturally as it can be brilliant.

The Koplin Gallery has assembled a show of Lebrun’s drawings from the early 1960s that picture the body as fully rounded in form but driven only by carnal impulses. Many of the drawings were inspired by texts--Brecht’s “Threepenny Opera,” Dante’s “Inferno” and the writings of the Marquis de Sade.

Characteristically robust and meaty, the bodies in these drawings press into one another, often with desperate compulsion. Faces remain shadowed in primal darkness or cropped; these relations are strictly corporeal. Emotions seem extraneous except as they manifest aspects of power and submission.

But there is humor here as well--the ludicrous, sweaty, acrobatic humor of furious fornication. A few subjects even succeed at contortion, folding themselves over backward with grotesque elasticity. Lebrun’s muscular, liquid line makes all of his figures limber, and his mode of drawing them in multiple states of movement simultaneously creates an effect that he called “fluid montage.”

Contours overlap and intersect in ways that suggest animation, which Lebrun taught briefly at Disney Studios. In the larger body of Lebrun’s work, that dynamism captured a range of human passions involving faith, tragedy, transcendence.

Here, the energy is of a more base nature--orgiastic, animal, but nevertheless essentially human.

* Koplin Gallery, 464 N. Robertson Blvd., (310) 657-9843, through Jan. 8. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Don’t Look Away: It’s not always easy to look at Daniel Weinstock’s photographs at Fototeka, but neither is it easy to look away. The allure of the bizarre and deformed is too strong to resist, and in Weinstock’s pictures something is always askew.

A bride saunters through a cemetery, a wrinkled old woman sucks from a baby bottle, a man sprawling on a hospital gurney serves as a perch for a contented cat.

Dwarfs, people with leprous growths or the signs of Down syndrome are pictured, as are nudes in unlikely situations--bound in plastic wrap, for instance--and women whose tears cascade down their cheeks in gritty, dark rivulets.

Drama lapses into melodrama a bit too often, and Weinstock adopts so many affectations (painting over images with varnish and then scratching words into the varnish, kitschy hand-tinting and toning) that even the shock value wears thin, but he is keen to the theatrical possibilities of ordinary life, both for ordinary and extraordinary subjects.

For his straightforward, unabashed portraits of men and women on the fringes, he owes a substantial debt to Diane Arbus, who regarded those she photographed as heroes rather than freaks. Weinstock, who lives in Mexico City, shows himself adept as well at classic street photography in an image of three men standing in a warehouse-type space, each in white shirt and dark pants, each holding a single pig’s head--while a full-bodied living example of the species lies sprawled at their feet.

Weinstock spreads himself thin in this, his first solo exhibition in the United States, and the results are wildly uneven--severe, stagy, sensitive, surprising.

But such elasticity is not necessarily detrimental, especially as it allows him to stretch so eagerly into unsettling terrain.

* Fototeka, 1549 Echo Park Ave., (213) 250-4686, through Sunday. Open Friday through Sunday.