These Images Are Twined Into Ropes of Ideas

The Christopher Grimes Gallery looks like the scene of a crime these days. The space is charged with violence and feels dense with absent souls. Tunga, the Brazilian artist represented by a compelling series of photographs last year in the gallery’s South American group show, “Amnesia,” now takes full possession of the space, as well as the senses of all who enter.

The show is a psychically wrenching experience, its images indelible. Two installations dominate the main gallery, but they read as one continuous, charged environment.

Pieces of cloth dyed a red slightly thinner than blood are strewn about the floor, many of them twisted into ropes and coiled with copper wire. A steel cane sized for a giant leans against one wall, and hanging from it is a 50-foot-long braid made from three strands of the twisted red fabric. The sensuality and mystery of hair has long preoccupied Tunga, and to these tresses he overlays a Rapunzel-like mythicality.

They reference the roped sheets--nicknamed “Teresa,” a play on the Portuguese word for “tress”--used by Brazilian prisoners as a means of escape. Scattered among the sheets on the floor are seven leather suitcases, each cracked open to reveal fragmented body parts cast in wax the color and texture of flayed skin.

One also holds a skull. The horror quotient is high, and the scene is a nightmare of the mind as much as of the body. By using multiple casts of his own head, Tunga has staged a complex mirroring of the fragmented self.

The sense of entrapment evoked here (and countered by the sheets’ promise of freedom) suggests not only actual incarceration or bondage but also the subtler, more private pain of duality, which Tunga also conjures in the neighboring photographic sequences “Cain and Abel” and “Stalker.” Tunga’s art is insistently material, tactile, but the repeated use of his own face and a brooding recitative on tape urge it into more interior realms.

He takes a fluid approach to his own work, frequently recycling elements by shifting their combinations and contexts. The natural (and not detrimental) consequence is a fluidity of meaning that Tunga clearly courts. The immediacy of his work is on par with its opacity. What sustains the tenuous balance between meaning and effect is Tunga’s agility at eliciting a poetic density of sensations.

* Christopher Grimes Gallery, 916 Colorado Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 587-3373, through Feb. 20. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Still Vibrant: Few arguments are as tired as the one that claims that painting itself is tired, a medium exhausted, depleted of possibility. Any one of Stephen Curry’s stunning new still lifes at Koplin would eliminate that notion from serious consideration. Both abstract and representational painting have plenty of juice left in them, and together in ever-shifting balance in Curry’s work, they make quite an intoxicating blend.

Curry paints tabletop arrangements of fruit with rapturous regard for each object’s mass, texture, color, absorption and reflection of light. Though the individual apples, pears and melons seem to rest on a flat surface, Curry avoids the specificity of an actual tabletop and sets them instead within amorphous fields of color. Doing away with the conventional hierarchy of subject and ground, he makes the relationship a dynamic, highly charged dance of suppression and revelation, dominance and submission, fusion and exquisitely tense equilibrium.

In “Then and Again,” one of the larger paintings in the show at 5 by 6 feet, the ground varies from a cool, slate gray to a warmer, more luminous green, vacillating from dense opacity to a translucent wash of drips, alternately behind, beside and in front of several pieces of fruit. Vastly enlarged over their natural scale and meticulously rendered, the fruits read as characters in a dramatic tableau.

A bruised apple in the center of the canvas sinks in on itself; it has passed its tipping point and is now a dying thing, poached upon by tiny flies. Next to it rests a robust melon of radiant gold and the dry, skeletal twig left from a picked-over cluster of grapes.

Here and throughout Curry’s work, the classic still-life metaphors of mortality and transient beauty are actively at play. Cherries shift in another work from lush, sensuous gems to faded beauties with puckered skin. The fertile gives way to the desiccated. Extracting and adapting aspects of Dutch still-life tradition, American Luminist painting and postwar abstraction, Curry, in his quietly adventurous way, reminds us of the inexhaustibility of paint.

* Koplin Gallery, 464 N. Robertson Blvd., (310) 657-9843, through Feb. 20. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Star Sightings: While it’s not uncommon these days for an astronomer to discover and name a comet or asteroid, the stars in our nightly canopy are already spoken for. If they were suddenly up for grabs today, however, our textbook star-charts would look dramatically different. Who do you know who would name a star after Cassiopeia instead of themselves? Who still knows (and cares) about the myths of Orion, Cepheus or Perseus?

Constellations that echo life as it’s lived today are what Benji Jasper Whalen presents in his clever little show at Dirt Gallery. On two large, blue-denim panels, he has embroidered a new set of constellations, one for the northern sky, one for the southern. He has cleared the sky of its mighty heroes and given it over to a stick figure Everyman, engaged in such banal acts as drinking straight from the bottle and peeing into a toilet.

Whalen, who lives in San Francisco, coyly recasts several of the traditional constellations into crude, angst-filled vignettes. The archer still appears, for instance, but now his drawn arrow points back at himself. The Virgin has been replaced by a pregnant woman, the serpent by a snake halfway through its lunchtime mouse. The two dogs remain, but you would hardly call them Great Dog and Little Dog anymore. They’re just your ordinary dogs, doing ordinary dog things like sniffing each other under the tail.

We see what we want to see when we gaze up at those specks of light, just as, in his two other works in the show, Whalen spoofs the innocent folly of spotting familiar shapes in the clouds by painting (in bleach on denim) cloudscapes composed entirely of multi-party sexual situations. Things get darker, literally and figuratively, in the night sky, where Whalen has figures fighting, hanging themselves and shooting others, going down in a sinking boat and crashing in cars.

Sewn with diagrammatic clarity in sprightly yellow and white, these maps of the cosmos mirror the violence and depravity of our culture below. There is something perversely cute about an embroidered stick figure shown with its head in the oven, but the laughter it elicits is uneasy. Heroic virtues may have commanded the night sky once, but now baser instincts rule.

* Dirt Gallery, 7906 Santa Monica Blvd. #218, (323) 822-9359, through Feb. 6. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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After the Fact: In the early 1980s, Sherrie Levine crystallized Postmodern doubts about the viability of both originality and authenticity in a series of photographs she made of other, more famous photographs. She exhibited them under her own name, with titles like “After Walker Evans” and “After Edward Weston.” A slight snicker was all that those one-liners deserved, but the pictures ended up buoying a star-quality career for Levine, now established as the doyenne of appropriation, not just for the way she recycles the work of others but also for the tiresome way she rehashes her own.

Now at Margo Leavin Gallery, she presents “Interieurs Parisiens: 1-60 After Atget” (1997), which reprints a series of documentary photographs first compiled by the French photographer in an album in 1910. Atget’s studies of sitting rooms, bedrooms, kitchens and hearths from homes across the class spectrum are unpeopled, but they’re rich with human presence. One scholar has proposed that the series, with its careful juxtapositions of the humble and the extravagant, constitutes a sort of political self-portrait of the photographer.

Levine’s deadpan re-presentation doesn’t encourage a critical reading of Atget’s work; the reproduction quality is intentionally poor, and the images lack their original captions. Atget’s photographs now are simply raw material for Levine’s conceptual exercise, one that claims to critique authority and originality out of its own quiet desperation for either.

Levine poaches on painters’ work as well, sucking the life out of Monet’s studies of the facade of Rouen cathedral in a 1995 series of painfully bland 8-by-10, black-and-white photographs. Work by her own hand--a series of oak panels with checkerboards drawn on them--is equally lazy. One can easily intellectualize the effort and spin theories around Levine’s work, but neither would hide the utter void at its core.

* Margo Leavin Gallery, 812 N. Robertson Blvd., (310) 273-0603, through Feb. 6. Closed Sundays and Mondays.