Larry Rivers Attempts the Really Big Picture

At the Skirball Cultural Center, three mural-scale paintings by Larry Rivers go so far out of their way to be pedestrian and accessible that they end up looking like a hodgepodge of oversize illustrations from a junior high school student’s history textbook.

Rivers’ title--”History of Matzah, The Story of the Jews”--clues viewers in to his attempt to represent 4,000 years of history without being bombastic or by making a monumental work that dwarfs and distances viewers. He brings a sense of self-deprecatory humor to the daunting project, commissioned by collectors Sivia and Jeffrey Loria and completed in 1984.

Rivers has succeeded in making an unpretentious triptych that does not follow a linear narrative. Instead, it weaves various stories, symbols and idiosyncratic anecdotes into a loose tapestry that allows viewers to dip into its dreamy, easygoing flow. Patriarchs, prophets, kings and villains share space with schematically rendered cities, maps, battles and moments of infamy.

No claim to present a complete or exhaustive overview is made by the diagrammatic paintings. Moses (modeled on the artist’s cousin, Aaron Hochberg), the Statue of Liberty and an anonymous Hasid are given prominent places, but direct references to the Holocaust are not to be found. Rivers’ images suggest that history is unfinished business, the present’s incomplete inheritance from the past.

Comic relief comes in the form of Michelangelo’s David, who has been circumcised and given Semitic facial features. Likewise, Leonardo’s depiction of the Last Supper becomes the Last Seder, complete with a plate of matzo. This humble food plays a major role in Rivers’ paintings, filling in backgrounds and glossing over breaks between disjunctive pictorial elements.

Consequently, the triptych is less monumental than intimate. You don’t stand back from its images and gaze up at them reverentially so much as move up close, sometimes falling into their crowded but far from full compositions.

However, as soon as Rivers’ paintings invite you in for a view that is “up close and personal,” they put you off with their dry surfaces, wan paint-handling and inert figuration. As paintings, they are far from satisfying. Fifteen works on paper are also exhibited, but because draftsmanship is not Rivers’ forte, these are only interesting as studies--examples of how particular scenes changed as they became part of larger compositions.

* Skirball Cultural Center, 2701 Sepulveda Blvd., (310) 440-4500, through May 30. Closed Mondays and Tuesdays. Admission $8.

*

Whim and Vitality: Titled “Monument to My Neuroses,” Cisco Jimenez’s second solo show in Los Angeles turns the tables on much recent body-oriented art. Insisting that the mind is part of the body, the Mexico-based artist’s works simultaneously suggest that one’s most potent neuroses do not necessarily stem from one’s own corporeal form, but can be caught like the common cold: unintentionally picked up from one’s surroundings, as if by osmosis.

At Rosamund Felsen Gallery, Jimenez’s exhibition consists of 18 collages painted and drawn on canvas, panel, paper and old tablecloths, as well as three pint-sized assemblages, which stand on the floor like pathetically outnumbered (and outsized) underdogs. As a whole, the artist’s scrappy and affable works present one man’s view of ovulation.

The only constant in Jimenez’s casually multilayered images, which include newspaper clippings, photographs and found objects, are textbook-style illustrations of female reproductive systems. Hovering over views of various mosques, these T-shaped configurations have the presence of religious icons.

Juxtaposed with quickly sketched organic forms, they look like loopy cartoon characters. Paired with stainless steel sinks, they resemble symmetrical emblems. And wedged between a pair of carved shoehorns, one exploits classic Surrealism’s tendency to see bullish virility in ordinary things.

Humor accompanies Jimenez’s odd obsession with ovulation. For example, “Buying a Stove but Ovulating at the Same Time,” “Fabulous Ovulation” and “Fallopian Tubes Intending to Run” all convey a sense of flat-footed affection for a process that the artist cannot experience firsthand, despite his interest in it.

Having spent his childhood and adolescence in close quarters with his mother and three sisters, Jimenez appears to be no stranger to the ins and outs of the female reproductive system. Haunting his art like a ghost, it serves as a metaphor for his desire to produce works that artificially generate their own visual vitality.

* Rosamund Felsen Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 828-8488, through April 3. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

*

Dovetailings: Now that down-sizing seems to be the order of the day, many goods and services are being stripped of the bells and whistles that once differentiated them from similar products. In contrast to such bare-bones pragmatism, John Williams’ installation of sprawlingly awkward objects at Dan Bernier Gallery puts a premium on flashing lights, screeching sounds and ornamental gizmos.

Unfortunately, the young artist’s first solo show in L.A. is so extremely focused on bells and whistles that most of its works deliver little of substance beyond their attention-grabbing theatrics. Six contraptions transform the main gallery into a clunky sound-and-light show that occasionally charms, but often its special effects seem too slight to merit the work that went into them.

The title of “Slide Projector” is its only understated component. Equal parts Christmas tree, construction scaffolding and DJ booth, this record-playing, light-projecting sculpture strikes the pose of a functional structure but actually invites viewers (and listeners) to do little more than admire the cleverness with which the artist has manipulated albums, 35-millimeter slides and electronic gadgetry.

Likewise, the visual and auditory impact of the five other works falls short of their cobbled-together elements, suggesting that Williams does not believe that what something does has a great deal to do with how it looks.

A promising exception to this aesthetic of dysfunctionalism occupies the gallery’s entrance. “Washing Machine and Butterflies” uses a rotating spotlight to link the thumping rhythm of an unbalanced washing machine to a roomful of wire-and-plastic butterflies, whose wings appear to flutter in sync with the sound. Here, appearance and activity momentarily dovetail, forming a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.

* Dan Bernier Gallery, 6150 Wilshire Blvd., (323) 936-1021, through April 17. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

*

Sharp-Edged: William Dwyer’s abstract wall-sculptures at Kiyo Higashi Gallery represent a break-through body of work. More sensuous, conceptually rigorous and visually captivating than anything the 55-year-old, L.A.-based artist has previously exhibited, these five pieces of welded steel are exciting because they make sexy bedfellows of strength and delicacy.

Cut with laser-like precision, Dwyer’s wall-reliefs are as painterly as they are sculptural. Each consists of from 148 to 280 strips of steel, welded together so that their unevenly cut edges face forward, forming complex surfaces that resemble computer-generated maps of the ocean floor.

Each of the myriad vertical elements that make up a single sculpture isn’t much wider than a line, measuring only one-eighth or one-sixteenth of an inch. Imagine an enormous set of saw blades made by an eccentric tinkerer and you’ll have an idea of the curving, tooth-like configurations at the root of Dwyer’s art. As you walk around his mesmerizing works, their wildly irregular surfaces, filled with innumerable nooks and crannies, trap light, thus appearing to be animated by some kind of quivering energy.

Part of their pleasure is profoundly formal. With painstaking patience, Dwyer builds up line after line, gradually moving from a single dimension to a two-dimensional plane and finally to a three-dimensional object. Each of his category-defying pieces gives giddy physical form to abstract geometries that otherwise exist in an entirely conceptual realm.

If you think that abstraction is merely bland decoration that lacks sharp edges and emotional peaks, Dwyer’s amazingly subtle works present evidence to the contrary. All that is modest about these scintillating works is their scale. As far as beauty, ambition and long-lasting satisfaction go, they deliver the goods with impressive regularity.

* Kiyo Higashi Gallery, 8332 Melrose Ave., (323) 655-2482, through April 24. Closed Sundays and Mondays.