Paintings Take a Serious Look at Cartoonish Human Nature

Can serious paintings also smirk? The surprising answer from New York-based painter George Condo is a resounding yes. His witty and ambitious recent work at Patrick Painter Inc. shows how.

In the tumultuous 1940s, when abstract Surrealists peeled back the decorum of modern life in order to expose the unconscious primitive urges lurking deep within, roiling signs of primordial and archaic imagery issued forth. Half a century later, Condo is engaged in a related excavation, as his 11 paintings and three drawings demonstrate. He has exactly those earlier precedents in mind, including the work of Picasso, De Kooning, Pollock, Roberto Matta and Wilfredo Lam.

But there’s a definite hitch. It isn’t archaic imagery that gushes forth from the primordial ooze of Condo’s “Mental States,” as this body of abstract work is collectively titled. Instead, bubbling up from the dense, overall tracery heavily drawn in black oil or acrylic are raucous, bug-eyed, big-toothed cartoon characters. Forget totems, she-wolves or prehistoric protozoa. Think Mighty Mouse, Hello Kitty, Pluto and Goofy (perhaps with rabies or distemper).

Condo paints like a dream, using scuffed-up surfaces and calligraphic extensions of his arm and wrist to create dark and explosive spaces. Sometimes they’re clouded over with white or gray, but the dark palette of browns, blacks and blues feels grave. When you follow a snaking arabesque to its logical conclusion--the inescapable suggestion of a dog’s hind leg, furiously scratching at fleas--or, when a series of speedy loops suddenly congeals into a head that looks an awful lot like Woody Woodpecker, the gravity is interrupted by a guffaw.

Ever since Pop, cartoons have been the reigning symbol for the sheer madness of contemporary life, which is one reason cartoons have turned up everywhere in art over the last several decades. (When, incidentally, will a museum get around to organizing the definitive survey of the glaring phenomenon?) Like Pop, which used cartoons to depict the cliches of Abstract Expressionism, Condo’s remarkable pictures establish a link to an earlier heroic moment for art. But his work suggests that fundamental human nature is indeed cartoonish--base, endearing, pathetic, mad, fun and not quite so noble as we’d probably like to think.

* Patrick Painter Inc., Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 264-5988, through Jan. 27. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Between Rural and Suburban: In his 1975 black-and-white photograph, “Nevada,” Henry Wessel shows a vast, open desert studded with power lines, glimpsed between buildings. At the left is a neatly painted little house, at the right a dilapidated outbuilding. An older man joins us in surveying the tentatively occupied territory between and beyond.

Loosely speaking, we’re in the vicinity of exurbia, the shaggy, peculiar, ill-defined space between the rural and the suburban that writer A.C. Spectorsky identified in 1955 as a new phenomenon of postwar America. At Gallery Luisotti, “Exurbia,” a savvy and well-chosen show of 20 photographs, drawings, small paintings and a funny video, takes us on a tour of exurbia and its people.

Dreams of heaven meet up with hellish conflagrations. Judy Linn records a typical brick rambler in Michigan, its garage door painted over with a dreamy pastoral mural of a snow-covered landscape, while the newsy photographs by Tom Lawson show ranch-style houses that, having wandered too far, are now engulfed by wildfires.

A small painting by David Deutsch wobbles between abstraction and figuration, as crimson trees amid small gray dwellings seen from an aerial perspective suddenly begin to look like infected blood cells seen through a microscope. In a deft gouache by Dike Blair, the comforting view of a garage at a rural home, witnessed through an automobile windshield, is undermined by the ominous apparition of a billboard for Marlboro cigarettes amid a nearby forest of barren trees.

Most of the work in the show is relatively recent, but antecedents are also included. In addition to Wessel, Judy Fiskin is one pioneer represented by a tiny 1976 image of a camper parked amid stone outcroppings in a Western desert, where it looks like a lumpy lunar landing craft. Lewis Baltz, whose late-1970s photographic series on the post-industrial landscape of Irvine is one well-known example of the genre, is represented by a marshy landscape where trash from unseen human interventions piles up at the picture’s margins.

The most recent work is a short videotape by Barbara Ess, which records the perambulations of an earnest woman mowing the lawn in a very large backyard. She plods back and forth from a foreground near an unseen house to a distant background surrounded by hedges and trees. She hauls lawn furniture out of the way as the mower buzzes and spews bluish clouds from the gasoline engine. Quietly observed, her routine progress is transformed into a gently comic choreography--a latter-day Lewis and Clark, taming the modest wilds of modern exurbia.

* Gallery Luisotti, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 452-0043, through Jan. 7. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Blurring the Lines: Like Robert Ryman, Joseph Dumbacher and John Dumbacher regard painting in the most fundamental way--as pigment applied to a flat surface attached to the wall--and they emphasize only those elements in their work. Like Donald Judd or John McCracken, they regard acute, machine-like precision of material fabrication as an essential erasure of the artist’s hand, with its attendant baggage of self-expression, and an affirmation of art’s objecthood. And like Robert Irwin, John M. Miller and light-and-space artists of various persuasions, they give surprising form to intangible ephemera.

“Negotiating Boundaries,” the Dumbachers’ solo debut (or perhaps duo debut--they’re twins who collaborate) at Patricia Faure Gallery, draws on all these precedents. Yet, the finished works have a character all their own.

Each work is made from pure pigment in tones of gray with undertones ranging from green and blue to brown and black. The pigment has been mixed into an epoxy resin and poured into a three-sided stainless steel channel, where it hardens. The channels, mostly 2 2/3 inches wide and three-fourths inches deep, range in length from just under five inches to nearly 10 feet.

Mounted vertically or horizontally, each is attached to the wall by one or more screws whose exposed heads are cushioned by thick, black washers. Internal compositions are formed from blocks of different colors, which are separated from one another by narrow spaces where a separating wall has been removed. These gaps between solid chunks of color become paradoxical structural elements--voids that are tangible. The graphite-like pigment absorbs light, while the stainless steel reflects it.

Contemplative in the extreme, the Dumbachers’ mysterious objects are like style-conscious, post-industrial amulets. The result is 23 distinctive works that nestle comfortably among usually separate categories of painting, sculpture and installation art.

* Patricia Faure Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 449-1479, through Jan. 6. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Quiet and Compelling: Nothing much happens in the nine figurative paintings by Brian Calvin in his fine L.A. solo debut at Marc Foxx Gallery. Two people drink iced tea by a chain-link fence. A man blows idle smoke rings. Others pick at a guitar, look out the window, hold a candle aloft and give a hand signal, show a painting to a prospective buyer (apparently you) at an art gallery, or work in the studio. In the most complex scene, a woman standing knee-high in a lake holds a can of beer, while a fellow on the shore turns his back to her as he holds a book titled “Telepathy.”

Telepathy, indeed. These pictures are oddly engaging, with their protagonists’ understated efforts at silent, rudimentary communication.

The main reason is Calvin’s savvy painting style. His landscapes and interiors and the figures that occupy them are all flatly painted, while simple shading and highlights are restricted to only those places necessary to distinguish one shape from another. Big blocks of bright color fit together like chunky puzzle pieces.

Typically, the figures appear to have been set down first, with the backgrounds painted in after. The result is a kind of airless mosaic of blunt color-shapes. The boundaries of human bodies and body parts seem wholly determined by their context, while independent figures are linked to one other through physical connections of space.

The ancestry of these paintings would surely include the important Chicago Imagist painter Jim Nutt. But Calvin (who studied at the Art Institute of Chicago before moving to L.A.) demonstrates a more open, loose-limbed manner. Something memorable seems to be in the works.

* Marc Foxx Gallery, 6150 Wilshire Blvd., L.A., (323) 857-5571, through Saturday.