Portraitist Takes Conceptual Route out of Predicament

For the last seven years, Mexico City-based artist Monica Castillo has been making portraits--mostly of herself, but recently of others as well. In the 10 works from 1999 and 2000 at her Los Angeles solo debut, which opened Tuesday at Ace Gallery, she wrestles (with varying degrees of success) with a tough dilemma: Especially for a painter who is Mexican, female and a self-portraitist, how might one escape the prison of an Expressionist art rooted in psychosocial autobiography? Call it the Frida Kahlo Problem.

Castillo’s answer has been to turn toward Conceptual art, where two primary sources seem significant for her work. One is the German tradition of typological photography that ignores individual personality, begun by August Sander and updated today by the numerous artistic progeny of Bernd and Hilla Becher. The other is Bruce Nauman, whose wide-open approach to materials and their eccentric relationship to the body are reflected in Castillo’s use of everything from woven strips of vinyl and painted flesh to video and photography.

In the pictures made from vinyl strips in primary colors (plus black and white), faces and facial fragments come unraveled. A diptych on tall vinyl panels splits the image of a nude torso in two, the fine spray of inkjet color engorging into big polka dots that define the body’s surface. (Wittily, they echo nipples.)

A big C-print mounted on aluminum shows a woman’s face head-on, her eyes hidden behind a superimposed black “anonymity bar.” Scrutinize the stranger’s face, and peculiarities emerge. Her short, swept-back hair is disheveled around the forehead, but the unruly strands appear to have been drawn or painted on. Tiny facial hairs around the mouth seem augmented with blond and brunet highlights (is it the hair that’s touched up, or the photograph?). A small red blemish above her covered eyes may--or may not--be authentic.

In Castillo’s portraits, identity is a mutable mask. “Corner Face” makes the mask physical, through paint applied to an airy net of filament. This metaphorical skin is yanked away from the wall by a taut wire, stretched between a sidewall and a hook attached to one of the portrait’s eyes--the so-called window of the soul, which here makes a viewer wince at the painful sight.

Most powerful is a pair of short videos, in which the act of painting has direct physical consequences with emotional resonance. A small paintbrush is used to paint directly on the surface of a man’s eyeball, which soon gets teary, and on a man’s genitals, which soon gets erect from the stimulation. Sorrow and pleasure aren’t represented here so much as physically embodied.

* Ace Gallery, 5514 Wilshire Blvd., (323) 935-4411, through February. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

*

An Upward Spiral: The best new paintings by Philip Taaffe at Gagosian Gallery exude the luxurious pleasure of an exotic garden. Think of the New York-based painter’s work as a place of man-made seduction and extravagance, designed to invite sensuous dreaming.

Taaffe treats canvas like fabric, repeating patterns and subjecting the cloth to multiple processes of staining, stenciling and printing with acrylic, enamel and oil paint. “Desert Nocturne” is a kind of “starry night” composed from a dense cluster of starbursts arrayed above a roiling field of flowery crimson tendrils. “Spiral Totem (Red)” and “Spiral Totem (Yellow)” are tall, narrow, banner-like pictures screen-printed with fat spirals over stylized fleurs-de-lis, or in off-register layers that make them feel dimensional. The pressure from the printing process allows the wooden stretcher bars of the painting to show through on the surface, creating a structural pattern that recalls a trellis.

“Cistern With Glass Flowers” is the most visually complex work, stained in a rich, shifting spectrum of greens, yellows and reds, then layered with tall, thin vessel shapes edged in black. The motif of an upright vessel is countered by a horizontal screen, which recalls a Persian window. The whole picture is overlaid by a fluid pattern of wide, rippling bands of color--some solid and flat, others shaded and tubular. You have the feeling of looking through deep, moist, luxurious space, glimpsing a mysterious inner sanctum.

Several of Taaffe’s canvases employ what appear to be photo-transfers of leaves, feathery ferns, seaweed and even crabs. Yet, the more naturalistic, the less successful the painting is. Description gets in the way of imaginative reverie. The result is a decidedly uneven show, punctuated by moments of exceptional painting.

* Gagosian Gallery, 456 N. Camden Drive, Beverly Hills, (310) 271-9400, through Dec. 22. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

*

‘South’ Images: In “South of North: 12 Photographers From Mexico City,” guest curator Daniel Weinstock focuses on mostly Expressionist camera work for a show at Fototeka. Aline Shkurovich records the pain of birth in a color triptych. Carmen Reyes conducts a dialogue with the camera in apparent self-portraits that show her clutching at her body in excruciating close-up. The print surfaces in portraits by Oscar Rios are scratched, abraded and smeared with paint, so that even a mundane genre image of a young woman idly smoking in a coffee shop becomes a figure of considerable anguish.

Technically proficient, these and other works in the show are also conventional and safe, rearranging long-established signs for human frailty and loss. More compelling are two groups of significantly different photographs.

Monica Ruzansky offers seven color prints from a series called “Dreams,” in which the camera is used as a distancing device rather than a tool to probe beneath the subject’s skin. Using hazy focus, overexposure and oddly filtered light--all photographic “errors”--a ghostly figure is shown emerging from a closet, a naked form lopes through the woods, a person’s head hovers on a pillow. Ruzansky conveys a subtle sense of disconnection, which acts as a doorway to suggestive levels of experience beyond what lies on the surface.

A grid of nine tombstone-like prints by Ulises Velazquez, further shrouded in wide black mats and black frames, takes perverse delight in decay and the decrepitude of flesh. In one, a naked youth offering lilies and a skull carries an erotic charge. In another, worn hands press on sagging skin to make it smooth. In a third, a corpulent fellow is bedecked with garlands--and pitchforks.

Thematically, the photographs by Ruzansky and Velazquez fit with the rest. But each has found a potent method that leaves the standard devices of Expressionism behind.

* Fototeka, 1549 Echo Park Blvd., (213) 250-4686, through Dec. 16. Closed Mondays to Thursdays.

*

It Was a Very Good Year: Drawing on and helping to establish principles of Minimal and Conceptual art, German artist Hanne Darboven has produced one of the stranger bodies of work since the 1960s. It’s coldblooded yet ecstatic. Systematic yet spiritual. Dully repetitive to the point where ornate ritual takes over.

At Regen Projects, a single work titled “The Year 1974” configures time as a kind of map or scientific chart. A grid of small drawings in black ink on white vellum wraps around two walls, six rows of 62 drawings across. Methodically framed in silver behind glass, each of the 372 works records one day of the year (plus indexes to explain the code).

Darboven has devised a code in numbers, squares and lines, which is repeated on every sheet. For instance, 27+5+7+4=44 translates into the 27th day of the 5th month of 1974, recorded on the 44th drawing. Those numbers are plotted out below in boxes, beneath which a series of horizontal lines counts the drawings and their place in the sequence of days.

Diaristic without being autobiographical, “The Year 1974” recalls the eccentric visual relationship between musical notation and sound. (Not surprisingly, Darboven briefly considered a career as a pianist.) The piece is billed as homage to German scientist Wilhelm von Humboldt, an Enlightenment figure who wrote on aesthetics, law, social issues, religion and other subjects, all from a perspective of scientific rationalism. Darboven’s loopy notation of time’s passage demonstrates just how eccentric reason can be.

* Regen Projects, 629 N. Almont Drive, West Hollywood, (310) 276-5424, through Saturday.