Energized, Eclectic Works of Woelffer

A terrific selection of 30 works Emerson Woelffer made between 1947 and 1988 takes viewers on a whirlwind tour of the 85-year-old artist’s unflaggingly vivacious oeuvre. There’s nowhere for your eyeballs to rest in this giddy mini-retrospective at Manny Silverman Gallery. With each body of work transforming elements from previous ones into increasingly insouciant abstractions, the L.A.-based painter keeps viewers delightfully off balance with his fresh, sometimes cheeky, always satisfying images.

As a whole, Woelffer’s art travels (at an often dizzying, whiplash pace) from European Surrealism to American Pop and beyond. Bypassing the torment and angst that energized the New York School, his brand of gestural Expressionism favors the social space implied by numbers, letters and other legible symbols. The public-directed advertisements found on billboards and in print are a constant touchstone of his jazzy improvisations, in which in-the-street energy is joyously articulated.

To step into the gallery is to know in an instant that you’re in for a treat. So jampacked with graphic impact are the insect-like fish forms in four masterpieces in the foyer that they alone are worth the trip. Through an adjoining office’s open double-doors hangs “O=X,” a nearly square knockout of a painting from 1951 in which loaded brush strokes of screaming yellow jostle against stabs of dazzling white and dashes of fire-engine red in an electrifying dance that leaps off the wall.

The main gallery juxtaposes eight canvases from the 1950s with six paintings and ripped-paper collages from the 1970s. Where the first group is more contained, weighty and earth-toned than anything else Woelffer has made, its embrace of abbreviated, Minimalist gestures loosens up in the light-handed lyricism that takes shape in his canvases from the ‘70s. One of these, a trompe l’oeil depiction of a collage made of torn sheets of brightly colored paper, explicitly acknowledges how this swift, decisive and secondhand medium freed Woelffer’s art from undue solemnity.

In the back hall and office, four punchy works from the 1960s and two from the 1980s show Woelffer at the top of his game, transforming incidental tidbits and disposable scraps into works as playful as they are potent.

A small canvas to which he has glued the wrapper from a loaf of French bread boldly declares “Parisian” as it Americanizes--and proudly commercializes--a traditionally European art form. Likewise, two funky constellations of polka dots made of fingerprints recall the thrills Thoreau and Emerson experienced by losing themselves in the tumult of their mass-produced surroundings. An American original, Woelffer demonstrates that art can be accessible without diminishing in value, impact or authenticity.

BE THERE

Emerson Woelffer, Manny Silverman Gallery, 619 N. Almont Drive, (310) 659-8256, through Feb. 26. Closed Sundays and Mondays.