Cubans’ Disparate Work Shares Lively Spirit

The Elian Gonzalez case isn’t the only sensational thing to come out of Cuba lately. Young Cuban-born artists have made a resounding impact internationally for well over a decade with Jose Bedia, perhaps, the best-known of the lot. Now, thanks to a wonderfully lively show at Couturier, Angelenos can add two more names to the burgeoning list--Abel Barroso and Ibrahim Miranda, both of whom are exhibiting in L.A. for the first time.

Cuba itself, the physical form of the island, plays a central role in the work of Miranda (born in 1969). Painting in ink atop actual printed maps of Cuba, Miranda tweaks the map’s conventional function of delivering concrete information and renders it instead a visual playground of possibilities. The curved strip of land transmutes into a thorned plant, a sinuous phallus, and, in three striking woodblock prints, a skeletal creature, a trail of stones and a dragon with wild, flame-like legs.

The maps upon which Miranda works offer data on the country’s population, its wind patterns, commercial imports and cultural amenities, but the information is entirely subverted by the overlying painted or printed patterns. It’s an adulteration of sorts, but a playful and beautiful one that renders Cuba a fluid, living thing. Miranda does not deny the map’s significance as bearer of content, but folds its associations into the mix so that form verges on symbol, but can also stand alone as a pure, delightful gift to the eye.

Barroso (born in 1971) makes a clever contribution to the tradition of woodblock printing by converting his used, carved wooden blocks into wall-mounted sculptures with movable parts. The four constructions on view here have a refreshing bite to them, their satirical imagery a synergistic partner to their inventive, resourceful form. A hand-turned crank in ‘WWW.WoodenInternet.com” scrolls a paper catalog of block printing tools across a pseudo-screen framed by wood. Desk chair, keyboard and mouse are also carved in wood, the forms recognizable but raw, with the simple punch of cartoons. The irony of using the Internet in a high-tech office to access a catalog of low-tech tools makes this amusing contraption hum.

Such sharp but humorous disjunctions fuel each of Barroso’s spunky works here, including “No One Can Assemble This,” a tour de force of formal and critical ingenuity. The large print, cut into jigsaw pieces, hangs on the wall fully assembled, while its printing block, cut in similar pieces, rests on the floor beneath it, several pieces askew. The image, of a bikini-clad beauty reposing on a boardroom table and surrounded by globe-headed, picture-taking, money-making suits, acts as a witty, all-purpose metaphor for exploitation, whether of women, poor tropical nations or any other object of desire turned into a commodity by the global marketplace. Barroso has the force of George Grosz with him here, and plenty of fine, funky spirit of his own.

* Couturier Gallery, 166 N. La Brea Ave., L.A., (323) 933-5557, through May 13. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Packed With Punch: The terms that come to mind in describing Jerome Witkin’s paintings--aggressive, violent, abrasive--are some of the same terms tagged on social deviants, individuals who disrupt the conventional code of behavior, sending a troubling ripple through the culture of which they are both a part and apart. Witkin’s paintings, at Jack Rutberg, are stains, incitements, tragedies, horrors, mirrors, awakenings.

Of the 50 paintings and drawings in this memorable show, a handful are portraits and stark urban landscapes that delineate, quite ably, humanity’s benign shell. The rest are unsparing penetrations deep into the roiling psyche--complex, prismatic takes on the brutality that shadows basic human kindness. “The German Girl” (1997), for instance, is a large (84 by 127 inches) yet concentrated image of fear and desperation that pits obvious victims of the Nazi regime--a flood of men in concentration camp uniforms--against a lone young girl whose identification with the perpetrators (through a Nazi uniform among the belongings in her room) implicates her, situating her among the responsible, the guilty. Yet in this scene, the tables are turned, and as the inmates intrude upon the girl’s protected space, they reclaim some of their own power while she, representative of the body politic that stripped them of it, cowers weakly in a corner.

Witkin’s most powerful paintings hinge on the notion and practice of violation. The moral violations that play themselves out in his Holocaust-related images, especially, are reinforced by his violation of spatial logic. Scale is often disjunctive and discontinuous; figures are repeated in the same painting as if spliced together from disparate cinematic scenes; and narrative, instead of cohering to the order of the smooth, chronological line, is caught in a barbed knot of ever-immediate events. Such a strategy has been used equally successfully in Holocaust-related fiction on the premise that the extreme, incredible and absurd require representation in kind. Straight information rarely has this kind of indelible, pungent force.

* Jack Rutberg Fine Arts, 357 N. La Brea, L.A., (323) 938-5222, through June 3. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Only the Lonely: Marc Trujillo’s paintings at Ruth Bachofner are hardly startling, but they have the potency of well-calibrated statements. They mirror the culture of anonymity that pervades our contemporary public spaces, and they do so in a style correspondingly clear, direct and unemotional. What surprises, then, is how affecting this tight group of work is, how its emotional monotone evokes a real sense of melancholy and loss.

Trujillo avoids drama or even overt irony. He selects subjects straight from the everyday--the car wash, supermarket, movie theater, airport lobby--and paints them with dispassionate realism. He favors a straightforward, middle-distance view, broad enough to define a space, but not so close that its occupants need to be individualized. Modest in size (most between 1 and 2 feet per side) and titled only by the street address of the subject, they are exercises in pronounced restraint. They describe the generic in visual terms that feel almost transparently neutral.

And yet these are careful, knowing paintings. In their plain-spoken honesty about the blandness of the environment we’ve wrapped ourselves in and the anonymity of the exchanges such an environment generates, they stir a nostalgia for genuine human contact, intimate exchange. Trujillo paints people silently lifted by an airport escalator, perusing the processed fare at a theater snack bar or shopping in the antiseptic order of the supermarket-all mundane, non-events that require only a superficial engagement of attention. If our days, our lives, are filled with transactions such as these, where do gratification, nourishment and meaning reside? The loneliness implicit in Trujillo’s paintings brings Edward Hopper to mind--Hopper in the flat, fluorescent life of the urban everyday.

* Ruth Bachofner Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 829-3300, through May 13. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Promise Thwarted: Painters Christine Taber and Alex Weinstein share the walls at William Turner in a show that simmers with promise. Motifs are stretched a bit to thin in both artists’ work, but many of the paintings are ravishing and inspire faith in the sensibility behind them. The works appeal in part for their seductive beauty, in part for their status as teasers, previews of coming attractions. Sadly, Taber’s promise was abruptly thwarted last week when she was killed in a traffic accident. Now the show brims with tragedy.

Taber’s paintings read like notes on brief, fleeting sensations--poems celebrating speed, blur, indeterminacy. Nearly monochrome in slate and earthy rust tones, they show nothing specific, but suggest the out-of-focus background elements in photographs. “Armature” is a gorgeous network of streaks and solids, blurred dabs linked by a multitude of thin trails. With the help of the title of “Zoe in Rows,” smudged dots of darker gray against lighter read as repeated heads, and the vague, stuttering portrait takes on the wondrous magic of a flickering cinematic moment.

Rembrandt serves as the foundation for Weinstein’s series of work here, particularly the warm, burnished brown that Rembrandt is famous for, that deep space soaked in darkness and redeemed by the luminous auras of its inhabitants. Weinstein courts the effect and verges on achieving it. His small paintings of flowers, especially, radiate a passion for the marvels of paint’s translucence. Blossoms with filmy outer petals hover in viscous plum-brown darkness, and in a few works based on Rembrandt’s religious paintings, the flowers are replaced by indeterminate bursts of light, small notes of grace. Weinstein’s large canvases have a more diffused beauty than the smaller, precious icons. Their fine technique needs something substantive to attach itself to. May Weinstein find it, and more.

* William Turner Gallery, 77 Market St., Venice, (310) 392-8399, through May 20. Closed Sundays.