Sculptor’s Wooden Characters Give Little Away

Silence hangs about Stephan Balkenhol’s new sculptures at Regen Projects, and silence tends to raise suspicions. What is being suppressed, what secrets concealed, held back?

Balkenhol’s wood-carved human figures, smaller or larger than life but never life-size, stand singly, with declaratory presence. They seem about to proclaim themselves, announce their identities, roles or reasons for being, yet they are mute. Through sexual innuendo or the melding of human and animal attributes, Balkenhol cracks a smile often enough in his work to dispel doubts about an aggressive intent. This isn’t a sneering silence--silence as theft. This is silence as a gift, albeit a vexed and provocative one.

Balkenhol’s work ensnares the eye immediately. More than just carved, these figures are chewed, splintered, scraped and chiseled. They feel like three-dimensional equivalents of the raw, ragged lines of German Expressionist woodcuts (Balkenhol disavows the affinity, citing instead his student years under the clock of cool, neutral minimalism). In fact, both strands of influence strike an uneasy alliance in his work: The impassioned physicality of the process screeches to a halt at the dispassionate expression of the subject. The friction of the combination is fertile.

The silent confrontation of these disparate forces imposes itself onto the reading of the work, making it easy to see these men and women as leading double lives--tame and controlled on the outside, fierce within. The figures wear nondescript clothing--slacks, skirts and blouses painted onto the wood in unmodulated color--but one woman holds a rifle, one man rests an ax on his shoulder, and another wears a black mask over his eyes.

Balkenhol, who divides his time between France and his native Germany, toys here with myths of the American West. He has silk-screened a film still of cowboys on horseback onto a plywood panel, which hangs opposite a chalkboard-like pastel drawing of a man straddling a phallic cactus. The West of fantasy, of rugged frontiersmen and rifle-totin’ heroines, lends a faint sexual charge to the anonymous, uniform lives these characters appear to exemplify. While the conformity of their dress and their flat, emotionless expressions function as a blank screen, all projected readings are, at best, a loose fit.

As quiet as these works are, they elicit a stimulating rumble of responses. Their detachment feeds our engagement. Balkenhol sees his figures as mirrors, reflecting our own fears and fantasies, and they do have the same inviting (and distressing) honesty about them. They reflect us in all our nakedness, but they leave judgment aside.

* Regen Projects, 629 N. Almont Drive, West Hollywood, (310) 276-5424, through April 10. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Timeless Vistas: However affected William Smith’s painting style, his work has genuine, immediate effect. A young artist from Philadelphia having his first solo show in Los Angeles at Jan Baum Gallery, Smith paints landscapes that filter earlier eras’ visions of nature through present-day, low-level angst.

His vistas are broad and timeless, unanchored by the chronological specificity of architecture, modes of dress or any other sign of human presence. But like Joan Nelson and others, Smith forces his paintings back in time by falsely, cleverly aging them, going heavy on the umber and sepia tones, browning the edges. In many works, a translucent layer of brown, like aged varnish, descends from the sky like a curtain announcing the end of an act or the fading viability of such an Arcadian view.

Smith paints beautifully, fervently and fluidly. Every movement of his brush can be traced in the streaked sky or stippled foliage, which pulls us close at the same time as the faux aging of the scenes pushes us gently away, imposing a veil of nostalgia. The purity of these landscapes, when seen through such a veil, becomes almost painfully precious.

In a quiet, thoughtful series of five paintings on book pages, Smith urges the viewing of the landscape through the lens of mortality and the human life cycle. The pages, from a book of poetic quotations, progress from the subject of childhood through adulthood, retirement and death; the images painted on them correspond to the shifting perspectives of the different phases of life.

In youth, things such as a single tree are seen with plain, bold clarity. At death, the subject has not changed much, but now the view is dematerialized, a matter of shadows and reflections.

This glorious disorientation recurs in a stunning sequence of 18-inch-square paintings that confirms Smith’s talent, beyond the coy finesse of the aged surfaces. Here, Smith plays most deftly with space and time, building each image of sky reflected on water seen through trees from characteristics like transience and density, pressure and ephemerality. The surfaces dance to a rhythm of tension and reprieve that is well-calibrated and hypnotic.

* Jan Baum Gallery, 170 S. La Brea Ave., (323) 932-0170, through April 24. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Dots, Drops and Puddles: Teo Gonzalez’s recent paintings at Hunsaker/Schlesinger gallery have a delightfully split personality. Their appeal rests on the equilibrium Gonzalez orchestrates between the disparate impulses that spawn them.

Each painting, whether 1 foot square or 9 feet square, consists of tens of thousands of dots of paint dropped onto the canvas in a grid pattern. Reducing his palette almost exclusively to primary colors, Gonzalez paints blue on red, yellow on blue, blue on blue and black on black.

Typically, the paint in the first layer of drops is diluted and the second layer more opaque, resulting in small, nearly clear puddles with a dense dollop of pigment in the center and a concentration of color along the rim. Random constellations emerge within the grids, and in some paintings Gonzalez aligns variably sized dots in bands.

Meticulous but not suffocatingly so, Gonzalez’s paintings balance order and chance, consistency and deviation, geometric pattern and organic asymmetry. Even at their biggest they feel modest, in part because they are conceptually narrow, but also because they are the materialization of a meditative act--a private performance of small, repetitive motions.

More sensational in their chromatic contrasts than Agnes Martin’s work, Gonzalez’s paintings have a similar interiority about them. They breathe within the confines of their own proscribed method, as the artist’s nimble touch collaborates with the amorphous force of gravity. What they produce together here is often radiant, surpassing what each could achieve alone.

* Hunsaker/Schlesinger Fine Art, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 828-1133, through March 27. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Beastly Images: Jo Ann Callis’ rogues’ gallery of dog portraits at Craig Krull Gallery represents both a departure from and a continuation of the artist’s earlier work. Callis has long photographed staged tableaux, peopled and not, and these images have the same stark theatricality that animates her photographs: an edgy, charged relationship between figure and ground.

Her work in the 1980s included photographs of objects that she sculpted, but this show of straight paintings is a first for her. Ironically, the images have more in common with precedents in photography than with painting, at least paintings of dogs. Not the tame, loyal companions stationed at the foot of the bed as symbols of fidelity, these dogs bring to mind the freaks photographed by Diane Arbus or the crass human beasts of Garry Winogrand. Though a few of the images have all of the benign appeal of photographs of other people’s children, most are more unsettling.

The dogs appear closer to their feral origins than we’re used to seeing; they seem to teeter on the edge of control. “Babe’s” yellow eyes cross fiendishly, her ears press against her head like crashed paper airplanes and her huge, curling pink tongue flaps and wags wildly. “Jacko” could have been named after Jack Nicholson, for his sly, slightly crazed grin. “Giles” appears wan, too pink around the eyes and slightly out of focus.

Callis photographed all these dogs before painting them and has kept the candid snapshot effects of the camera flash, including the otherworldly red-eye gleam. She paints well, with nuance and sympathy, and the works carry a respectable psychological load, due to the best-friends connection we have with dogs and our tendency to endow them with human traits.

Still, these are paintings of modest ambition. They bear less iconic weight than Callis’ photographs, but they do so without pretense.

* Craig Krull Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 828-6410, through April 10. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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