Deacon’s Playful Sculptures Are Monuments to Creativity

To walk through Richard Deacon’s exhibition at L.A. Louver Gallery is to feel as if you’re meandering among monumental three-dimensional doodles. Imagine that the seven free-standing pieces in the London-based artist’s second solo show in Los Angeles are supercharged versions of the tiny squiggles people draw on scraps of paper, and you’ll have an idea of the lighthearted whimsy at the root of these gorgeously glazed ceramic sculptures.

Measuring more than 6 feet from top to bottom, the tallest one looks like a giant corkscrew whose spiraling strand of metal has swollen so dramatically that no space remains between any of its curves. Its bulbous shape calls to mind conical seashells whose rough edges have been worn smooth by the surf.

The lowest sculpture, which rises to mid-calf, resembles a bird’s-eye view of a Formula One racetrack, its hairpin turns snaking around one another with precision that would be dizzying if they weren’t so bloated. Looking more like an over-inflated balloon than a flat track, Deacon’s olive-tinted object consists of curves that nestle in one another, leaving no room in between.

A mid-size work, made of 11 blobs glazed in a blue-and-white pattern, resembles a snugly stacked column of plaid cushions. No two components are identical, and each pillow-like form is so tightly snuggled into its neighbors that no space comes between them.

But there’s more than fun and games to Deacon’s masterfully crafted abstractions, which are as formally rigorous as they are playful. The hushed aura of an august, once-in-a-lifetime social occasion surrounds their sinuous forms, endowing the austere, concrete-floored gallery with a sense of dignified magnificence that is all the more potent for its source in seemingly silly forms.

Deacon’s deliciously unpredictable sculptures have the presence of miniature monuments. Traditionally, monuments memorialize historic events, marking locations where visitors can pay their respects to the glories of the past so that their legacies might live on in the present.

Likewise, Deacon’s 3-D spirals, squiggles and blobs pay homage to the death of the doodle.

Not so long ago, people doodled a lot more than they do today. When telephones had cords, multi-tasking didn’t exist and land lines kept our bodies in one place for minutes at a time. We’d pass the time by making little scribbles in the margins of pages.

Today, when we talk on the phone we’re more likely to be driving across town, surfing the Internet or doing a household duty than scribbling with a pen. In the face of such obsessive efficiency, Deacon’s sculptures stand as a silent protest against a work ethic that is getting the best of us. A joy to behold, his terrifically indirect works counteract the imaginative impoverishment caused by incessant productivity.

* L.A. Louver Gallery, 45 N. Venice Blvd., Venice, (310) 822-4955, through Nov. 25. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Out-of-Body Experiences: To find sitters for her provocative portraits, Katy Grannan places ads for “art models” in newspapers in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., Madison, Wis., and Austin, Texas. She then travels to the homes of the people who respond and embarks on what must be extremely curious photo sessions. The large-format prints that result, in which many of the first-time models are nude, combine a healthy dose of I’ve-got-nothing-to-hide naturalism with a love of artifice that refuses to apologize for its sleazy intrusiveness.

Grannan’s images at Kohn Turner Gallery give physical form to the adolescent feeling of not fitting in--in one’s family, one’s hometown and, in some cases, one’s skin. The anonymous, far-from-remarkable people in these multilayered portraits do not appear to inhabit their houses as much as they seem to haunt them like spirits.

The youngest (and only fully-clothed) sitters look as if they’re so preoccupied with what’s going on in their heads that they’re completely unaware of their bland suburban surroundings. Grannan accentuates this sense of being out of place by holding her camera near the floor and aiming upward.

While this gives her compositions the out-of-proportion awkwardness of gangly teenagers, it also allows her to kidnap her subjects, spiriting them out of their homes and into the world of contemporary art.

A barefoot boy, with ruffled hair and oversize glasses, resembles a youthful Charles Ray, whose own self-portraits embody an astonishingly similar sense of being dazed and aloof. Also barefoot, a pubescent girl poses on a kitchen’s linoleum floor. Wearing an expression of precocious world-weariness, she could be auditioning for a role in a Cindy Sherman film still.

The most compelling photographs are the nudes, particularly the young women, who appear alone or with a friend, a lover, a child or a pet or two. Shot from further away than the fully clothed sitters, these portraits intensify the incommensurability between the models’ imperfect bodies (whose proportions are anything but idealized) and the generic rooms in which they stand.

Using only bright lights (to give the skin of her sitters an alabaster glow) and an ordinary fan (to make their hair appear to be blown by mysterious winds), Grannan endows her pictures with the same dreamy serenity that gives Botticelli’s “Birth of Venus” its ageless appeal. Her nudes, however, are equally indebted to modern pornography, especially to magazines that feature snapshots sent in by readers.

Combining the give-and-take manipulation of Sophie Calle’s photographs with the ripe sexuality of John Currin’s paintings, Grannan’s loaded portraits lay bare a world in which voyeurism and exhibitionism rub shoulders--and art and life become strange bedfellows.

* Kohn Turner Gallery, 454 N. Robertson Blvd., West Hollywood, (310) 854-5400, through Nov. 30. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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A Pleasant Trip Through Time: A lovely selection of nearly 100 page-sized works on paper by Abraham Walkowitz (1878-1965) revisits the career of an artist whose reputation rests on the role he played in bringing European Modernism to the United States in the first decade of the 20th century. At Galerie Yoramgil, this touching survey of drawings, watercolors, pastels and a smattering of etchings, monotypes and lithographs reveals that Walkowitz’s wholehearted embrace of modern art left plenty of room for charm and sweetness.

Unfortunately for the artist, as Modernism became an American institution, it dispensed with such humane sentiments in favor of stripped-bare authority. Neither a profoundly original artist nor a hard-line defender of an exclusive doctrine, Walkowitz fell into the background, where he has stood a shadowy figure familiar to historians but unrecognized by a larger public.

This exhibition goes a long way to change this situation, presenting works from the estate that have never been exhibited before. Nearly half of the drawings, made from life and from memory, depict Isadora Duncan, whom Walkowitz met at a dance performance in a private salon in Paris in 1906.

His swift studies capture an impressive range of physical expression, from the meaty solidity of an earthbound body to the gravity-defying lightness of a dancer swirling through space. Using various combinations of pencils, pens, brushes and crayons, Walkowitz transforms a single subject into an encyclopedic cataloging of mood, emotion and movement. His delicate ink drawings are his most graceful works.

Walkowitz’s lyrical lines sometimes break free of their descriptive duties to flirt with full-blown abstraction. These drawings link his figurative studies to a series of gestural abstractions, in which geometric elements suggest fragmented figures moving through schematic landscapes. More conventionally rendered landscapes round out the show, revealing that the Siberia-born, New York-based artist hopscotched from one body of work to another, going back and forth among subjects and styles with little concern for logical development.

This accessible exhibition respects Walkowitz’s idiosyncrasies and does not claim that he is a forgotten genius, an equal of Cezanne, Picasso, Rodin or Kandinsky (from whose work he drew freely). Instead, it simply invites viewers to travel to a time when art was progressive and endearing, as pleasurable as it was adventuresome.

* Galerie Yoramgil, 319 N. Canon Drive, Beverly Hills, (310) 275-8130, through Nov. 22. Open daily.

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Looking and Thinking: What Ralph Humphrey’s early works lack in excitement they make up for in refinement. At Daniel Weinberg Gallery, a handsome selection of seven exemplary abstractions that Humphrey (1932-1990) painted between 1954 and 1967 forms the first installment of a two-part show that provides a thumbnail sketch of his focused yet open-ended oeuvre.

All that’s old-fashioned about the New York-based painter’s restrained romanticism (or restless reductivism) is that you’ve got to sit still to get a feel for it. To this end, two comfortable chairs (along with a coffee table and vase filled with irises) have been provided.

In front of Humphrey’s paintings, sitting still has nothing to do with being complacent. Nevertheless, viewers who like to consume their art on the run will probably be frustrated by his slowly unfolding fields of color, which come in three formats: multi-hued blocks of paint applied with a palette knife and sponge; watery expanses of blue and gray (framed by blue-gray borders); and smoothly painted grounds interrupted by horizontal bands of thickly encrusted pigment.

Viewers who prefer to contemplate art only when they’re not in its presence (or under its influence) also are likely to be put off by Humphrey’s works, which insist that you think while you look. His deceptively simple images trigger a type of embodied contemplation that reaches maximum intensity only while you’re in their presence. Although your intellect may be flooded with ideas once you stop looking, these concepts are more closely linked to your memories than to your experience of the paintings themselves.

Think of Humphrey’s geometric abstractions as a form of addiction whose only remedy is prolonged exposure. This will give you an idea of the long-lasting satisfactions they deliver. Viewing them again and again does not feel repetitious because their built-in restlessness invites you see them anew each time you look--provided your eyes and mind are up for the challenge.

* Daniel Weinberg Gallery, 6148 Wilshire Blvd., L.A., (323) 954-8425, through Dec. 9. Closed Sundays and Mondays.