Show of Warhol’s ‘Camouflage’ Misses Power of Mass Display

Exhibitions like “Andy Warhol: Camouflage” don’t come along very often. But don’t bother rushing out to Gagosian Gallery to see this picked-over selection of mostly second-rate paintings from the last series the Father of Pop completed before his death in 1987. Such shows of leftovers are not often seen in these parts because few out-of-town artists and dealers still treat Los Angeles as a provincial backwater, filled with viewers who aren’t sophisticated enough to recognize the difference between a first-run presentation and a warmed-over rehash of works that didn’t sell the first time around.

It’s a shame there are only 14 paintings (and a grid of 12 approximately 1-foot-square panels) from a series so focused on the strength of numbers. Based on a pattern designed to allow soldiers and their equipment to disappear into the landscape, Warhol’s silk-screened canvases gain in resonance when seen in large groups.

Like the artist’s best works, these images condense multiple meanings into what initially seem to be dumb one-liners. They make fun of the idea that art’s job is to hide (i.e., camouflage) deep meaning somewhere on its surface. They raise questions about the serial aspects of art, which were highlighted by Minimalism and popularized by Pop. They also address the context in which discerning consumers pick their favorite piece out of a crowd of seemingly similar objects. Critics, curators and connoisseurs do this in galleries and museums; grocery shoppers do it every day in supermarkets.

An autobiographical element also sneaks into Warhol’s abstract paintings. Considering Warhol was a painfully shy gay man who thrived by hiding in the spotlight, his “Camouflage” series stands as a metaphor of his desire to make his way through a generally hostile world without being identified as an enemy, intruder or threat. Flamboyantly theatrical in their bold patterns and slyly secretive in the way they hold their own among other examples of New York School abstraction, these canvases--like real camouflage--embody a lot more than immediately meets the eye.

When this body of work was shown at the gallery’s New York branch last November, 47 paintings were double-hung, creating an all-encompassing environment in which figure-ground ambiguity ran riotously amok. Hot pink, chartreuse, purple and electric blue did battle with khaki, beige, olive drab and gray, forming a mock-heroic war between effeminate militarism and macho decoration. Although traces of Warhol’s deadly serious playfulness remain in the show’s current version, they’re faint echoes of what a proper presentation would deliver.

* Gagosian Gallery, 456 N. Camden Drive, Beverly Hills, (310) 271-9400, through Feb. 27. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Beauty of the Beasts: Tim Ebner’s new paintings come very close to being indistinguishable from the type of naturalistic illustrations that sometimes serve as backdrops for life-size dioramas in natural history museums, or appear in old-fashioned books about exotic, often extinct, animals. But the bears, woolly mammoths, prehistoric horse and wolf in his six big oils-on-canvas are too human in their stances, demeanors and expressions to seem at home in the wild.

Simpler and less self-consciously “artistic” than the painter’s previous bodies of work, his images at Rosamund Felsen Gallery walk a fine line between anthropomorphizing the creatures they portray and picturing them naturalistically. Hardly as cuddly as stuffed toys, Ebner’s animals are anything but vicious.

As a group, his fantastic menagerie of awe-inspiring beasts has the presence of a bunch of highly trained zoo animals that have escaped captivity to roam the Earth. What’s most remarkable about these pictures, however, is that their animals seem to inhabit a world purged of people.

Most stand on beautiful beaches, enjoying serene moments that imply there’s not a predator within miles. For the prehistoric horse strolling on the seashore, it is literally true that no humans are present.

The painting of a pair of mammoths dying in a blizzard emphasizes that the people-less world inhabited by the artist’s animals is not Edenic, but as threatening and deadly as any post-apocalyptic vision might be. In Ebner’s dreamscapes, nature is not a picnic in a manicured national park, but an awesome force not to be messed with.

Nevertheless, there’s fun to be had. In one work, a black bear awkwardly balances his bulk on his back legs as he rides a wave under a star-speckled night sky. In another, a couple of brown bears tentatively paddle a bright yellow board out into the surf, their faces marked by looks of fearful anticipation and giddy excitement.

As works of art, these images turn cliches about representational painting inside out. While this art form is often derided for being an escapist fantasy that invites viewers to deny the realities of their lives, Ebner fully embraces a fantasized escape to create works that say more about the humans who view them than the animals they depict. In his hands, painterly escapism takes you back to yourself in ways you hadn’t anticipated. After all, people don’t need to see themselves in a picture to be moved by it.

* Rosamund Felsen Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 828-8488, through March 6. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Cyber-Maze: Entering Stephen Hendee’s softly lighted installation feels like falling through your personal computer’s screen into a virtual world devoid of people, noise and face-to-face activity. So complete is the young artist’s transformation of Mark Moore Gallery that it’s easy to imagine that you have stepped, like Alice, through an updated version of the looking glass to inhabit the squeaky-clean bowels of some run-of-the-mill microprocessor.

A couple of corridors, whose faceted architecture recalls crystals and 3-D contour drawings, snake around one another, creating the impression that they belong to a vast electronic network. Underground crypts, subway tunnels and the endless halls of unfathomable bureaucracies are also evoked by Hendee’s strangely engaging installation, as are the sets of futuristic movies and the backdrops of action-packed video games.

Titled “Shadow Proxy,” the installation has a form that mimics that of the Minotaur’s labyrinth. Its content, however, is worlds (and centuries) apart from the mythological beast’s lair.

No visions of gory death at the hands of a flesh-devouring monster take shape in the artist’s cybernetic stage set. Yet a silent menace pervades its bloodless world, in which any type of direct confrontation has the presence of a long-lost fantasy.

Made of nothing more high-tech than foam-core, tape, vinyl and wood, Hendee’s walk-in sculpture has “temporary” written all over it. Yet it never feels flimsy or slapdash. Although its cheap, disposable materials share little with traditional sculpture’s mass, solidity and permanence, they’re perfectly suited to our Information Age. To cling to the outdated idea that sculpture must be chiseled from weighty substances isn’t that different from believing that your bills will disappear if you cut up your credit card.

In the back gallery, six black-and-white ink drawings bring the quivering touch of the artist’s hand back into Hendee’s otherwise coolly detached art. Strange as it may seem, they are not as captivating as his installation--which, true to its virtual nature, looks even better in photographic reproductions than it does in the flesh.

* Mark Moore Gallery, 2032-A Broadway, Santa Monica, (310) 453-3031, through March 6. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Visual Overload: At Flowers West Contemporary Art, 10 abstract paintings made over the past eight years by Bernard Cohen deliver an overdose of riotous visual stimulation. Big, bold and almost out of control, these wildly overwrought acrylics on linen are graphic extravaganzas in which layer upon layer of dizzying linear circuitry are piled atop one another to form dense, interpenetrating webs and fragmented patterns.

Unfortunately, the London-based artist’s overloaded images also demonstrate that a painting has to do more than grab your eyeballs and bounce them around the picture-plane like a pair of ricocheting pingpong balls.

Getting the viewer’s attention is only half the battle: Art must do more than move your optic nerves if it’s to sustain your interest long enough to become more than a passing diversion.

Cohen’s shamelessly sensationalistic pieces have no top, bottom or side edges. Meant to be hung any which way, they describe the disembodied space of maps or diagrams. Some, like “In the Distance,” “Nine Stops” and “Passing Through” resemble elaborate subway maps that have been covered with a summer’s worth of graffiti.

Silhouettes of airplanes and rocket ships appear in “Spinning Weaving” and “Of Clocks and Clouds,” relating the lines in these works to skywriting and jet exhaust.

Filled with spiraling squiggles, grids that angle into deep space and thousands of dab-like dots of paint, Cohen’s four black-and-white abstractions have the presence of lacy ornamentation and supercharged screen savers.

All that keeps you from dismissing these works as innocuous eye-candy is the fact that if you look at them long enough they’ll give you a headache.

* Flowers West Contemporary Art, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 586-9200, through Feb. 20. Closed Sundays and Mondays.