Photos Create Drama Out of Urban Solitude

The love affair that has recently blossomed between painting and photography continues to grow in Oliver Boberg’s C-prints. Things aren’t what they seem to be in the German-based artist’s pictures at Angles Gallery, and to their credit, that’s not what’s most interesting about these easel-scale images.

Each of Boberg’s unpopulated images depicts a nondescript location we commonly pass by or through without paying much attention to its generally inhospitable details. Making up the majority of his mundane subjects are such transitional structures as a freeway underpass, a parking ramp exit, a pedestrian tunnel, a cantilevered stairwell, a subway entrance and a Modernist building’s sunken foyer.

A vacant public square, built of nothing but granite, marble, steel and glass, gives even chillier form to urban life. An empty paved lot, bordered on two sides by the walls of an old brick church, suggests that displacement and alienation are built into the fabric of modern cities. But a lonely view of tar-coated rooftops and crumbling brick chimneys contends that such isolation has its own poetry, in which moments of reverie are all the more extraordinary for transpiring amid the tumult of crowded cities.

All of Boberg’s exquisitely crafted photographs embody the distinctly modern sense of being alone in a crowd--and being all the happier for it. This condition of freely chosen solitude goes hand in hand with the way he makes his photographs.

Rather than scouring the city to find the uninhabited scenes he wants to capture on film, Boberg builds miniature models in his studio. Setting them before blank white backdrops, lighting them so their shadows accentuate his attentiveness to every detail, texture and tint, he acts as if he were a one-man movie studio: set designer, constructor, lighting specialist and director. Actors are not necessary in his silent stills because the real dramas take place inside each viewer’s imagination.

Although Boberg’s technical wizardry is impressive, it’s a mistake to admire it for its own sake. It is also shortsighted to view his art as just another clever meditation on the illusory nature of contemporary reality.

Two photographs that depict little more than unremarkable roadside foliage, leafless trees, a guardrail and curb reveal that Boberg is as concerned with the blank white spaces against which his models are set as he is with anything he builds. In one, blinding whiteness fills the top vertical third of the picture, like a Barnett Newman “zip” painting suddenly cut short. In the other, pure emptiness accounts for more than half of the horizontal composition, as if a Hiroshi Sugimoto photograph of a blank movie screen had spilled out of the theater in which it was shot.

Giving physical form to the nothingness that lies just beyond the world we perceive with our five senses, Boberg’s pictures take up ideas that were once thought to be the exclusive province of abstract painting. With one foot in the here and now and the other in another world altogether, his prints invite viewers to get lost in the moment, whether in a room full of people or in the more satisfying company of private thoughts.

* Angles Gallery, 2230 Main St., Santa Monica, (310) 396-5019, through Feb. 19. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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That Decorative Touch: In the heyday of Abstract Expressionism, the worst thing that could be said about a serious artist’s work was that it was decorative. Times have changed, and today decoration is no longer a dirty word--at least, not among serious artists. Among others, whose shaky good taste merely follows yesterday’s prejudices, decorative is still a pejorative.

More than perhaps any other 20th century painter, Enrico Donati is an artist whose heart is dedicated to decoration but whose hand often followed a style defined by its denial of decorative lightness, elegance and elan. Like a sheep in wolf’s clothing, the New York-based Italian immigrant painted within the conventions of the New York School, even though he shared little of that movement’s interest in psychological depth, existential angst and aggressive improvisation.

At Alter & Gil Gallery, 19 paintings made between 1953 and 1966 (and four polished bronze sculptures from 1966 to 1973) reveal that no matter how hard the 91-year-old painter tried for gravitas and solemnity, his art always came out looking stylishly light-handed. Too well-mannered to buy into the seething emotionalism of “American-type painting,” his handsome canvases maintain an air of dignified playfulness.

So strong is Donati’s decorative touch that it even makes vacuum-cleaner dirt look beautiful. Large parts of the two earliest paintings are covered with the black gunk scooped from the bag of a vacuum cleaner, which, in Donati’s hands, has a rich, velvety feel. Absorbing light, it contrasts dramatically with the thickly troweled plaster that makes up the rest of the earth-toned abstract landscapes.

Rocky outcroppings, weathered boulders and partially carved stones form the foundation of the other works surveyed here. In the surface of one, Donati has embedded pebbles, giving it a gritty materiality. In most, however, he has used pulverized quartz--a more aristocratic form of dirt if ever there was one.

Catching the light, these reflective chips endow his images with a celestial sparkle and star-studded glamour. Such flashy theatrics go hand in hand with his increasing use of fiery oranges, hot reds, screaming yellows and blazing azures.

As the strait-laced 1950s gave way to the free-spirited 1960s, Donati’s paintings grew increasingly Pop, getting more cartoonish and emphatic in their amplification of illusionism’s effects. As an artist, Donati surprisingly shares more with what’s happening among today’s young painters than with the Abstract Expressionists to whom he’s often compared.

* Alter & Gil Gallery, 184 N. Canon Drive, Beverly Hills, (310) 275-8130, through Feb. 19. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Magical Forms: One of the best things about Sarah Charlesworth’s gorgeous new photographs at Margo Leavin Gallery is that you can walk right up to them and still not know what you’re looking at.

Although immediately you recognize what these nearly monochromatic prints depict--a book, Buddha, a bowl, a human skull and a pair of coiled snakes--you have no clue about what the artist did in the studio to get these objects to appear to hover, like ghostly apparitions, in the space between the picture-plane and your body.

Way beyond old-fashioned, Charlesworth’s uncanny photographs give stunning physical form to the primal magic of representation. In their presence, it isn’t difficult to imagine the terror-laced fascination some tribal peoples experienced when European explorers first showed them mirrors, or what it must have been like to be in the audience of the Lumiere Brothers’ 1895 short film, one of the first publicly screened movies, which caused viewers to flee in panic when a locomotive headed straight at the camera.

Although your mind knows that Charlesworth has not conjured actual objects by merely presenting their images, your body is not so sure. Even after you have carefully investigated each of the dozen laminated Fujiflex prints and uncovered the very basic studio tricks the artist used to create them, their mysteriousness remains undiminished.

Charlesworth’s pictures of palpable light, given solidity by a few subtle shadows, rank among the slowest photographs being made today. Rather than asking viewers to suspend disbelief, they seem to say, “Stay as suspicious as you want; we’ll continue to intrigue you long after our initial thrill has worn off.”

It’s common today for viewers to get everything they can from a digitally transmitted image in a few spit-seconds. But these mesmerizing prints strike a chord at the base of our brains, down near the spinal column, where reactions are instant and physical, yet continue to resonate well beyond their initial impact.

* Margo Leavin Gallery, 812 N. Robertson Blvd., West Hollywood, (310) 273-0603, through Feb. 12. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Art and Comedy: Scott Grieger is a prankster with a purpose. At Patricia Faure Gallery, his art of high comic relief gives form to the many faces of humor.

In the main gallery, the creepy aura of corporate spiritualism takes hilarious shape in 45 meditation pillows and cushions, which have been covered in 13 military camouflagepatterns and laid out on the floor in a tidy grid. Adorned with labels reading “DHARMY,” Grieger’s “Zafu/Zabuton Set” is an indispensable tool for aggressive meditators.

Flanked by a pair of huge banners adorned with “Swooshtikas”--Nike logos in a pattern recalling a Fascist cross--and facing a bright-red world map with an electronic clock and thermometer marking Los Angeles, Grieger’s installation also mocks the idea that art makes people feel good and can be marshaled by corporations to increase cooperation and harmony among its minions.

In a pair of painted collages from whose surfaces spill synthetic cold cuts, the frightening idea of world domination merges with warm and fuzzy notions of the globalism supposedly heralded by the World Wide Web. “Globaloney” and its smaller sidekick, “A Little Globaloney,” suggest that typically liberal pursuits are sometimes governed by the same unexamined assumptions of the conservatism they intend to oppose.

“Send in the Clones,” a hand-painted panel that looks as if it were computer-generated, adds to Grieger’s tongue-in-cheek embrace of the comforts of groupthink. But his screwball endorsement of family values is the funniest piece displayed--a wonderfully painted portrait of the prehistoric Venus of Willendorf standing proudly by her man.

Turning an ancient fertility goddess into a loving wife, “The Willendorfs” rewrites art history to show that much of art’s power lies in its capacity to throw a monkey wrench into any and every form of conventional thinking. Collectively titled “UnAmerican Activities,” Grieger’s provocative works are anything but.

* Patricia Faure Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 449-1479, through Feb. 19. Closed Sundays and Mondays.