Body of Art

A three-artist exhibition called “Drawing on the Figure” is currently showing at the Platt Gallery at the University of Judaism, but the title could just as easily be “Drawing Around the Figure.”

As it happens, these artists, in pieces both on the wall and the floor, deal with the figure in ways that explore the potential to stretch and reinvent the figurative impulse. Bodies serve ulterior purposes here and are not just straightforward subject matter.

In Ruth Snyder’s bronze sculptures, duality is the operative word. Figures, depicted in a style somewhere between abstraction and anatomical veracity, are modeled in a rough-hewn, wind-swept manner and placed on tall poles and pedestals.

Titles such as “Flight” and “Floating” suggest a lightness of being, but they are also heavy and leaden, scruffy of texture. “Moments” is a shelf full of backlighted, pudgy, featureless figures, propped up like pastries.

The figure makes for a subtler presence in Elaine Marinoff’s oil-pastel-on-rag-paper works, which are large in scale but soft-edged in effect.

Earth-toned and impressionistic, her imagery draws on the metaphorical resonance of cliffs and craggy rock forms, emblems of solidity and vulnerability. Into these scenes, vaguely rendered figures are inserted, adding up to hazy allegories of the oppression, and resiliency, of the Jewish people.

Figures in collagist Eugene Yelchin’s work are detached from reality, turned into the putty of metaphor, in a very different way. Yelchin’s process involves taking “found” photographs from newspapers and magazines, redrawing them, slicing ‘n’ dicing them into vertical strips and then reassembling them into incomplete images.

The end effect of this process further removes the figures from reality while instilling a kind of nervous, but basically ambiguous, urgency. Call it abstract agitprop.

Yelchin’s work, along with the other art here, reminds us that whenever figures enter the picture, the interpretive stakes are raised.

BE THERE

“Drawing on the Figure,” through March 14 at the Platt Gallery, University of Judaism, 15600 Mulholland Drive in Bel-Air. Gallery hours: Sunday-Thursday, 10 a.m.-4 p.m.; Friday, 10 a.m.-2 p.m.; (310) 476-9777.