He Scratches the Surface, but Little Else

Savvy gallery exhibitions in 1994 and 1995 revived interest in the brief career of local artist Robert Overby (1935-1993), who worked in relative obscurity in the 1970s. Overby was a successful graphic designer--his logotype for Toyota is still in use today--but an unsuccessful painter. Both gallery shows focused on the same intriguing, short-lived moment. During a 15-month period, he painted thick layers of latex rubber directly on building facades and architectural fragments, let the latex harden and then peeled it off. The castings that resulted, hung loose on the wall or suspended from the ceiling, possess the weirdly anthropomorphic presence of flayed skin.

About 30 of these flesh-like latex castings, made between April 1971 and July 1972, form the centerpiece of “Robert Overby: Parallel, 1978-1969,” an exhibition organized by guest curator Terry R. Myers that opened last week at the UCLA/Armand Hammer Museum. The show successfully puts the latex pieces in the larger context of the artist’s 10-year career as a painter. It opens with 17 works made prior to his first rubber casting (a humble sock) and closes with 13 made after he returned to more conventional types of painting. The weakness of those before-and-after paintings means that the show offers few aesthetic rewards that weren’t already unveiled in the earlier gallery displays.

Overby didn’t decide to become a painter until he was 34. He plunged into the art scene feet first, absorbing what was being made and exhibited in L.A. Throughout the Hammer show you can see his interest in vintage Marcel Duchamp, Frank Stella, Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg, Ed Ruscha, Vija Celmins, the light-reflective plastics of the so-called L.A Look and, most often, Joe Goode (his milk bottle and “torn sky” paintings and staircase sculptures).

There was also the genre of Process art, in which unorthodox materials like wax, resin, felt and rubber were being used by artists to imbue inert objects with a sense of life’s impermanence. In 1969, when Overby began to paint, Process art was already being certified in museum shows, especially the adventurous Whitney Museum exhibition “Procedures/Materials” and the landmark European show “When Attitude Becomes Form.” L.A.’s Bruce Nauman, whose body-oriented Process work with cast concrete, rubber, fiberglass and neon was central to these developments, had been showing almost annually since 1964 at West Hollywood’s prominent Nicholas Wilder Gallery.

All of Nauman’s materials, which he employed using furniture or his own body as molds, subsequently turned up in Overby’s art. With architecture as its template, Overby’s version of body-oriented Process art gave impermanence and entropy an Expressionist and environmental spin. Cracked plaster, flaking paint and drooping window sashes speak of age and ghostly transience. His largest group, taken from an old building ravaged by fire, upped the ante: The charred surfaces of “Barclay House” make decay, disorder and ruin almost operatic.

Overby’s latex rubber casts of doors and walls are negative molds of the positive forms from which they are taken. Standing in front of these sagging husks, it’s as if you’ve slipped within the surface skin of a vanished place. The uncanny experience makes your own skin tingle, as traditional intimations of mortality are embedded in new bodily awareness.

The exhibition tries to refresh these compelling but modest castings by repositioning them in history. Overby’s work from 1971 to ’72 is presented as art that questions ideas of uniqueness and originality--partly because latex “copies” replicate absent originals, and partly because they’re so clearly based on a wide array of Nauman’s earlier works. Overby is changed from a follower of Process art, which is what he actually was then, into a precursor of Postmodernism, which is wishful thinking now.

By his own claim, Overby was always a painter, and continuity in fact describes his output. Whether abstract or figurative, whether in oil on canvas or latex rubber on wood, Overby’s paintings all display a principal interest in surfaces.

The surfaces in Overby’s dozen oils are typically inert, and sometimes plain inept. Twice the show records the poignancy of a new painter’s struggle to get beyond the descriptive and inanimate, and to make the stubborn painted surface live. First is a 1973 portrait based on Albrecht Durer, in which a woman’s head is blurred except for one crisp eye, which aligns exactly with the picture’s surface plane. Second is 1977’s “Dear Rear,” a rude little painting in which a woman’s genitals do the same.

Overby made his last latex-rubber casting in July 1972. A month before, the groundbreaking international survey Documenta 5 had opened in Germany, and Nauman vaulted to the forefront of the pack. In December, Nauman’s hugely influential retrospective opened at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, before traveling to New York. Any chance that Overby could continue to experiment in a modest direction so clearly beholden to Nauman’s protean precedent was closed off.

The Hammer catalog complains that Overby missed becoming an established artist because he started late and because of prejudice against his success as a graphic designer. But the art tells another, simpler story. Aside from his modest memento mori castings, Overby just wasn’t much of a painter.

* UCLA/Hammer Museum, 10899 Wilshire Blvd., Westwood, (310) 443-7000, through Sept. 3. Closed Monday.

Images of Invention: In his densely saturated color photographs, Ruben Ortiz Torres typically prints the image so that the outer edges are loose, irregular, almost painterly. He also lets the sprocket holes in the film show. Visual cues like these interrupt the transparency of photography, which partly records the fact of whatever was in front of the camera’s lens. The framing also adds that these pictures are inventions.

If that were all it accomplished, though, Ortiz would just be cleverly covering established photographic territory. Instead, in the 20 often mesmerizing works currently at Jan Kesner Gallery, these framing cues also serve to italicize the fantastic inventiveness already displayed by the subjects of his pictures.

The show is titled “American Monarchy/Raza Cosmica,” and the photographs were taken in Southern California, New Mexico, Nevada, Texas and central and northern Mexico. Japanese robot-transformer toys strut on a sidewalk before a wall scarred with graffiti that blares, “Viva la raza.” Alarmed medieval knights parade on horseback before a looming Statue of Liberty. A bored alien-creature child sits at a school desk, framed by a blank blackboard and an American flag. An elderly man, wearing a crown and surrounded by a be-ribboned court, sits on a throne built from cases of Coca-Cola before a banner declaring “El Rey Feo”--the Ugly King.

Whether it’s a Las Vegas intersection between gambling casinos or a tourist display in Roswell, N.M., where flying saucers supposedly landed, Ortiz photographs with candid curiosity and without condescension. What makes his pictures so compelling is that they occupy, simultaneously, a place deep inside popular culture and another far outside it.

This strange simultaneity, which characterizes experience in our mass culture world, is poignantly recorded in a picture of bright blue sky filled with red balloons. They rise up from thousands of people packed in a stadium. The back of a woman’s head protrudes above the lower framing edge, while in the far distance the name “Jennifer Lopez” glows in little lights on an electronic stadium screen.

For Ortiz the world is already enchanted, if you know how to look. Partly the artist is just trying to keep up, partly he’s making a template with which to see what’s been there all along.

* Jan Kesner Gallery, 164 N. La Brea Ave., (323) 938-6834, through Aug. 5. Closed Sunday and Monday.

Interior Motives: Photographs of movie and television sound stages constitute a genre as old as those entertainment mediums. When not simply documentary, they usually contrast the artifice of a stage set with what we know of reality; or, they function as commentaries--often surreal--on the everyday world outside the studio gates.

In a solo debut exhibition at Low Gallery, Nicoletta Munroe tweaks this venerable genre. Whether her subject is an elaborate bed with a headboard of purple tufted brocade and surrounded by colored lights, an artificial cherry tree in full “blossom” before a photographic landscape mural, or--the strongest work--an oddly scaled patio swimming pool that reflects fake flowers, inflatable rafts and a clapboard bungalow facade, her 11 Cibachromes erase any sense of theatrical estrangement. The pictures instead show just another corner of our everyday world, where social myths get articulated by the stories pictures tell.

They do so through presentation. Each 32 inches high and 48 inches wide, Munroe’s big color photographs are mounted on slick plexiglass to stand away from the wall. Images made into objects, like sleek and carefully crafted furniture, the pictures are themselves props ready to set the stage of fashionable domestic environments, circa 2000. What they show and what they are suddenly merge, swallowed up inside each other.

* Low Gallery, 9050-9052 Santa Monica Blvd., West Hollywood, (310) 281-2691, through Aug. 5. Closed Sunday and Monday.