These Grand Divas Are Truly Larger Than Life

Kurt Kauper’s four new paintings of imaginary opera divas pick up where his last ones left off--staring viewers straight in the eye while seeming to look right through us. Loaded with the grandeur that is more familiar to medieval queens than even the most successful contemporary businesswomen, Kauper’s divas are at once magisterial and unpretentious.

Although they appear to tower above merely mortal viewers, flaunting the clear-eyed wisdom that accompanies utter self-possession, the women in these slightly larger-than-life-size images at Acme Gallery are neither haughty nor arrogant. With one exception, their facial expressions and body language reveal that they know exactly what they’re doing.

Consequently, you never get the sense that their self-images are falsely aggrandized versions of the actual achievements they have labored to attain, steadily perfecting their presentations and gradually growing into their mythical, larger-than-life roles.

As paintings, Kauper’s oils-on-panel do something similar. Absolutely magnificent, these sumptuously painted, stunningly realistic images stop you in your tracks. More important, the demands they make on your body and the claims they stake on your attention are not out of line with the pleasures they deliver.

With clenched fists firmly planted on her hips, the aged matron in “Diva Fiction #10” is a stern piece of work who doesn’t suffer fools gladly. Wearing her orange-red hair like a perfectly coiffed helmet, and her silvery green Chanel gown (complete with floor-length cape) as if it were battle regalia, this diva appears to be ready to take on any challenger. The arch of her eyebrows and the downward turn of her lips convey something less than disdain but more than disappointment, suggesting that she has confronted more than her share of viewers who have not measured up to the high standards to which she holds herself.

“Diva Fiction #7” depicts the only seated diva, yet the figure still manages to command the respect and deference of viewers, even though her position lets us literally look down at her. Simultaneously serene and impatient, her expression shares more with the seasoned authority of revered elders than the doting sweetness of stereotypical grandmothers. A tightly wrapped turban and a triple string of pearls frame her wise face, whose chocolate-brown skin radiates inner strength and dignity.

The remaining two divas are much younger, although the one who’s dressed up like a giant truffle is as unassailable, severe and no-nonsense as her more mature counterparts.

“Diva Fiction #8” stands out from her self-possessed counterparts because, unlike them, she poses and plays to her audience. She is a pretender. The painting depicts a plump white woman who stands sideways, her weight evenly distributed on her feet, and her hips thrust slightly forward. A wine-red Dior cloak, adorned with synthetic feathers, opens to reveal her folded hands, which rest suggestively on her pelvis.

Tilting her head back to highlight her carefully unkempt hair and fleshy throat, she purses her lips into a smirk that is as calculated as it is coy: not quite salacious but shamelessly flirtatious. Such provocative behavior suggests that she either lacks confidence about her own talents or is more than a little deluded about who she is.

Kauper’s other divas are powerful because they harbor no illusions about their own strengths. They may have struggled and suffered to get where they are, but--as great paintings--they will not give you an inch or apologize for their hard-won achievements. Pride is no problem when it’s backed up by fully visible facts.

* Acme Gallery, 6150 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles, (323) 857-5942, through March 13. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Power in Repetition: Following fast on the heels of Amy Adler’s recent Focus Series show at the Museum of Contemporary Art, her current exhibition at Margo Leavin Gallery delivers on the promise laid out in her museum show, establishing the young, L.A.-based image-maker as an artist to be reckoned with.

Three multi-part pieces, each consisting of between four and 24 unique photographs, add up to an exhibition remarkable for its maturity and pathos. The power of Adler’s accumulations of perfectly ordinary pictures resides in the nearly electric charge of restraint, dedication and frustration that suffuses them.

The exhibition’s centerpiece, “Nervous Character,” fills the main gallery. Wrapping around three walls are 24 medium-size color photographs of pastel drawings Adler made, probably from photographs she took of herself. Each plainly framed Cibachrome depicts the artist in close-up, with her straight blond hair parted down the middle and tucked behind her ears so that it curves upward as it rests on her shoulders. In the sequence, the prints, whose dark green backgrounds highlight the pinky whiteness of the artist’s skin, alternate between views of her tilting her head back to look high overhead and views of her bowing it to look downward.

Initially, the series appears to consist of only two images, each apparently having been reproduced 12 times. But to spend a few moments with these strangely understated self-portraits is to notice that the room is abuzz with the visual equivalent of nervous energy.

At first, you can’t put your finger on just what it is that generates this incessant, restless activity. If you study each image carefully, however, and pay particular attention to Adler’s hair, you soon notice that no two images exactly match. Every one is unique.

Holding 12 only slightly different pictures in your mind while you contrast one with the others is no mean feat. Also, such back-and-forth cross-referencing duplicates the artist’s own circular, self-referential process of making her multi-part portrait, moving from life to drawing to photograph before returning to life.

Although a viewer cannot possibly recapture the sensations and sentiments that went into Adler’s attempts to capture her own likeness, you do have a firsthand experience of each instant being separate and distinct from every other. In her talented hands, repetition does not diminish meaning or denigrate experience, but, when treated properly, actually intensifies emotional impact.

Adler’s four- and five-part pieces are less gripping. The first depicts an architect presumably looking back and forth between a model and his plans. The second shows a boy bouncing on a big yellow ball. Both have the stop-action presence of movie stills and suggest that the artist is her own best subject.

Less dramatic and theatrical than many of her earlier works, “Nervous Character” demonstrates that one of the best ways to amplify desire is to block or frustrate its fulfillment. Based on precarious balances and delicate, give-and-take negotiations, Adler’s art gives potent physical form to the rare moments when highly self-conscious manipulation yields to unpredictable vulnerability.

* Margo Leavin Gallery, 812 N. Robertson Blvd., West Hollywood, (310) 273-0603, through March 20. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Human Appetites: Sex may stimulate desire more quickly than anything else, but on a day-to-day basis, food probably satisfies more people’s desires more frequently. At Sherry Frumkin Gallery, Jane Callister’s new paintings throw art into the mix, suggesting that although eating food and having sex go to the primal core of who we are as people, looking at pictures is not far behind. Good taste, after all, is both visual and gustatory, as much a matter of using your eyes as your tongue.

Callister begins with the assumption that people, like bees, are drawn to bright colors and beautiful forms. Her variously scaled paintings on canvas and panel form a rainbow aglow with the luminous tint of neon.

A suite of window-like works combines mint greens with hints of olive and a wide range of violets, from deep burgundy to royal purple to ethereal lavender. Another group pits smoky, smoldering oranges against dense, velvety blacks, evoking the trick-or-treat mystery of Halloween. The three largest works, measuring 6 by 5 feet, play off the primary colors by creating all-encompassing environments in wildly synthetic tones.

Callister proceeds by scrambling the signs that keep food and sex in separate categories, using art as a bridge to link eating and procreating. Like a master baker, she blends pigments with wall plaster and applies the mix by using a variety of cake-decorating tools to form elaborate embellishments that make her paintings look as if they’re good enough to eat.

All around these lacy elements she arranges silhouettes of acrobatic men and lithe women engaged in all manner of sex acts. Imagine a cross between Kamasutra diagrams and the chrome bimbos that often adorn the mud flaps of trucks, and you’ll have an idea of how stylized Callister’s alphabet soup of sex positions is.

Increasing the abstractness of these figures, she applies velvet flocking to some and overlaps them freely, adding, subtracting and distending limbs to make for more attractive patterns and more beautiful compositions. These playfully mutant fusions suggest the boundlessness of sex but also recall melting ice cream cones.

Oral gratification is never far from Callister’s luscious paintings. Titled “Pornamental,” her fun-loving exhibition makes decoration look as if it’s a fundamental human drive, no different from our instinct to survive.

* Sherry Frumkin Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 453-1850, through March 30. Closed Sundays and Mondays.