Personal Touch

When Betty Duker bought Christopher Wilder’s “Orange Monochrome Fur Painting”--a rectangle of synthetic fur the color of a fireball stretched over a wood support--her oldest daughter said, “Mom, do you ever think you might be getting taken?”

“But how can we resist a painting that demands to be touched when everything we’ve ever been taught about art screams LOOK, DON’T TOUCH,” Duker wrote in an ebullient catalog essay for a traveling exhibition of art that represents about 25% to 30% of the family collection.

The show, at the Irvine Fine Arts Center through March 14, has an overly authoritative title (“Between Reality and Abstraction: California Art at the End of the Century”) for such a personal selection. Mostly from the ‘70s and ‘80s, and overwhelmingly from Southern California, it steers clear of significant artists whose vision is dark and whose materials are deliberately pathetic or perverse.

Still, it would be hard to find an umbrella label for a collection that embraces so many styles and attitudes. Perhaps the one feature that unites the Dukers’ holdings is their “stage presence.” This is art that demands attention, whether it waves gaily from a distance or beckons the viewer to peer closely.

The Dukers--who live in the Pasadena area but declined to provide any information about themselves--bought their first piece when they moved to Southern California from Indiana in 1974. It was both nostalgic and quirky: Phyllis Manley’s stylized painting of identical chickens stretching their long necks every which way as they perch on a tiered roost under a pale blue sky.

While other work from the 1970s has a blandly institutional quality--the little Chuck Arnoldi gouache, the free-standing Tom Holland aluminum sculpture--the 1980s usher in a broader range of vision.

The most appealing and unusual works in this collection--often by lesser-known artists--engage viewers in slowly unfolding perceptual discoveries, whether they relate to materials or to meaning.

The slight optical shock of seeing clean-edged, angular forms in pale yellow, black and white embrace one another animates Patsy Krebs’ painting “Untitled 6 (Linked: Ivory, Black, White”). Similarly, Gregory Mahoney’s sculpture “Dark Horizon” relies on the tension between a slender arc of burned wood and a triangle of blackened steel with a distressed surface that must be seen up close.

Small, quietly thoughtful variations on familiar themes give several pieces the kind of persistent appeal that makes a work of art a good household companion.

Russell Forester reworks a 1960s Color Field staple--the “stripe” painting--into a miniature essay in muted color and rhythmic repetition, using thin and thinner widths of paper speckled with needle-punched holes and spattered with taut bits of colored thread.

Joyce Lightbody couples a dense collage of postage stamp fragments (faces and decorative borders) with a quasi-archaic form of musical notation using tiny colored pennant shapes. “Pilgremz Bagz-Stude” has the intimate, precious quality of obsessive handwork that magically compresses a world view into a tiny compass.

Intimacy also informs Alan Rath’s “Portable Unit.” Bending close to the pair of speakers, mounted in a valise, to hear their separate stop-and-go rhythms, viewers may feel as though they’re listening to the heartbeat of two invisible creatures.

Viewers get a dislocated view of themselves in Fred Fehlau’s free-standing, doorway-sized piece, “Orpheus II.” (The title refers to the poet and musician of Greek myth who was instructed not to look back as he led his wife, Eurydice, back from the underworld; when he couldn’t help but glance at her, she vanished.) Two mirrored, white-striped panels are separated by open space, giving the impression that you’ve somehow misplaced most of your body.

The collection has abstract work by Roy Dowell, Peter Alexander, Marc Pally and Ed Moses and a figurative collage piece by Carole Caroompas that invokes themes of exotica and male-female relations. But the most wonderful, and subversive, painting in the show is Kim Dingle’s “Wild Girls Under Blue Sky (Smashed Wiener Dog).”

In this 1993 painting, a distant landscape is overrun by a multitude of white flyspecks: armies of little girls in fluffy white dresses. At close range, they act out scenes of primal desire--rage and playfulness unhindered by superegos.

One child seems to be strangling another; another pair help each other climb a tree. A pack of white girls races after a black girl. Several little girls walk around with their panties puddling around their ankles. Ghost figures of babies and animals lurk here and there, as if not yet hatched as full-fledged beings. Dingle’s seemingly effortless handling of paint gives this uncanny scene a dreamlike air.

The Dingle is one of a cluster of fresh, inventive works from the late ‘80s and ‘90s in the collection--including the Rath, the Wilder, Sandy Hubshman’s impish life-size enameled plaster tongue sculptures and Zizi Raymond’s empathetic installation “Limbo” (a child’s patent leather shoes balanced on a rock held aloft by a black umbrella).

It looks as though the questing irreverence and genuinely human concerns that have characterized much good contemporary art in recent years nicely dovetail with the Dukers’ own tastes. That’s a heartening state of affairs at a time when many collectors shy away from work by young artists whose names are not yet--and may never be--on everyone’s lips.

“Between Reality and Abstraction: California Art at the End of the Century,” Irvine Fine Arts Center, 14321 Yale Ave. 9 a.m.-9 p.m. Monday-Thursday, 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Friday, 9 a.m.-3 p.m. Saturday, 1-5 p.m. Sunday. Free. Through March 14. (949) 724-6880.