DeLap Tweaks the Status Quo With a Sly but Uneven Elegance

Canvas sculptures hanging on the wall, paintings in the round--what exactly are Tony DeLap’s artworks? DeLap has made a career out of subverting conventions and defying expectations, so the prospect of categorizing his work is thankless and largely also moot.

More relevant than determining what DeLap’s works are is enjoying what they do. They tease the boundary between serious and slight. They amuse, confuse and sometimes thoroughly satisfy. They can be zingers, emitting the temporary jolt of a one-liner. Or they can fester and linger in the mind with the cryptic elegance of a Zen koan.

DeLap’s recently opened retrospective at the Orange County Museum of Art covers 40 years of his bending and tweaking the formalist status quo. Curated by a former staffer at the museum, Bruce Guenther, the show and its useful catalog position DeLap as a first-generation Minimalist, whose geometric sculptures of the early 1960s were kin to the work of East Coast purists like Robert Morris and Sol LeWitt. But DeLap was and continues to be an impurist, an ardent fan of hybridity and visual gamesmanship.

He doesn’t always pull it off. Interspersed with works of extreme grace, the show has plenty of clunkers that look like outdated corporate decor. Chalk up the disparity to DeLap’s hybrid sensibility.

Although DeLap has long been a stalwart of the L.A. scene and an important influence on a generation of younger artists (most notably, sculptor Eric Johnson), his career started in the Bay Area, where he was born (in 1927) and raised. Having studied art, illustration and graphic design, he zigzagged for years between the so-called fine- and commercial-art spheres before settling on the artist track.

In 1960, he had his first solo museum show, and by the middle of the decade, he was being included in major national surveys of contemporary art, at the Carnegie Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art and elsewhere. In 1965, he moved to Southern California to teach at UC Irvine, where he remained until retiring in 1991. His friend and former student John McCracken moved down south too, joining DeLap and others in giving Minimalist sculpture in the area a slick, synthetic skin.

DeLap’s early geometric sculptures have serious bulk and the credibility, among East Coast Minimalists, of smooth, industrial finishes. But from the start, DeLap’s work has been relatively playful, and more apt to elicit smiles than to intimidate with the self-importance of the insistently austere. DeLap’s Minimalism is humbler than most--at times even banal--and user-friendly. He never really abandoned the principles of design and continues to practice its seductive strategies, fashioning catchy, concise visual statements promoting nothing but their own visuality.

DeLap’s lifelong interest in magic has also had an impact on his work. Early on, its influence was limited to overt illusions. A double-sided, three-dimensional painting, with dots painted on the external layers of plexiglass as well as in the center of the internal stepped-down form, presents mildly puzzling effects. In a 1967 installation, “Houdin’s House” (named after the French magician whose name Harry Houdini appropriated), DeLap projected an image of a levitating woman onto a glass wall, where it multiplied as it reflected onto the structure’s other metal and glass panels.

The gimmickry of these efforts verged on spectacle-driven Op art, but in the mid-’70s, DeLap turned a corner, and his instincts toward showmanship receded within a more elegant, sophisticated approach to form. Turning corners was, literally, at the heart of the change. What happens, he wondered, when you reach the edge of a painting’s surface, “when you run out of painting?”

Conventionally, the canvas turns the corner at an obedient right angle and heads for the wall. DeLap started tweaking that formula and produced a stunning series of monochrome canvases in the shape of wedges and notched, incomplete circles, whose edges were trimmed in wood and receded from the front plane at dramatic, acute angles.

The paintings, in subdued tones of chalky purple, cement gray and pale khaki, are understated but have a commanding sculptural presence on the wall. DeLap transformed the modest dimensionality of stretched canvas--ordinarily just a vehicle--into a dynamic object in itself. Brilliant but not glib, they synthesize Minimalism’s stark physicality with the subtleties of perceptual experience.

All that follows in DeLap’s work is commentary. The best of it over the next 25 years is characterized by this same sly elegance, by subversions, interruptions and twists. In the retrospective, several pieces from the late 1990s, in painted aluminum or canvas, are gorgeous distillations, nearly simple shapes in solid black, white or blue that meet the wall at less-than-obvious angles.

When DeLap’s work falters, as it does off and on through the ‘80s and ‘90s, it’s usually a matter of overstating its own case, flaunting its own cleverness and leaving little for the viewer to discover through time, movement and prolonged attention.

People have read too much into his interest in magic, DeLap laments in the catalog, although he has encouraged the connection by using titles like “The Conjurer,” “The Sorcerer,” “The Man Who Walked Through Walls” and by incorporating magic performances into some of his prior exhibitions. The works themselves, though, do not contain illusions whose secrets are denied to the viewer. The huge wooden plank (“Floating Lady,” of 1974) that stretches overhead across one gallery doesn’t hover in midair mysteriously but is supported by thick, obvious plexiglass panels wedged into the walls at either end.

DeLap doesn’t present unexplained mysteries; he stages opportunities for surprise. He engages optical and physical phenomena that have the self-contained magic of wordplay, like anagrams or palindromes. The forms in his work double back on themselves and twist unexpectedly, yet are always plainly stated. Clever, indeed, and sometimes also wise.

* “Tony DeLap,” Orange County Museum of Art, 850 San Clemente Drive, Newport Beach, (949) 759-1122, through Jan. 14. Closed Mondays.