Opening the Door on a Wonderland

Two years after he moved back to Los Angeles from the East Coast, Kenny Scharf finds himself on a creative roll, perhaps at the threshold of seeing a youthful dream come true.

Known for his surrealist-tinged Pop paintings and sculpture, inspired by a fascination with primary colors, animated cartoons and pop culture, Scharf is back in L.A. in a major way this season--with something old and something new.

Already opened is one of his signature “Closet” installations at LACMA West in the latest LACMALab exhibition, “Seeing.” Scharf’s contribution is a Day-Glo funhouse that is the 19th incarnation of an idea he started working with in the early 1980s. On Saturday at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, he unveils a one-man show of new portraits--paintings of friends and celebrities in costumes and settings born of his singularly wacky imagination.

And there may be more: Next year, fingers crossed, a Scharf animated pilot, for a series he calls “The Universals,” is expected to debut on the Cartoon Network. “It’s what I’ve wanted and I’ve been working for,” Scharf admits with a wry grin across his two days’ worth of stubble. “But it’s a lot to handle.”

Television was where it began. In 1965, in the San Fernando Valley, the Scharf family was among the first to own a color TV. Scharf, at 7, became fixated, not just by the programming, but by the tube’s colored dots.

“I would sit very close to it,” Scharf says. It’s a few days before the opening of “Seeing,” and he’s putting finishing touches on “Closet #19” at LACMA West. Dressed in a T-shirt and paint-splattered khakis, he looks across the table of a nearby cafe with a steady blue-eyed gaze. “I would stare at these dots--millions of colored dots on a black field--I was looking at these dots one inch away.”

“He was born into that change, the coming of color television,” says Tony Shafrazi, his New York dealer of two decades. “It had a big impact on him, a multicolor crazy world. He loved Hanna Barbera and ‘Star Trek’; they made up his alphabet of fantasy.”

As a kid, Scharf drew his own versions of “Jetsons” and “Flintstones” characters, and later he gravitated toward such Surrealists as Magritte and Dali in school.

Then, as an art major at UC Santa Barbara, Scharf heard about Andy Warhol and the Factory and decided that New York was his true destination. He enrolled at the School of Visual Arts and hung out in the East Village, just as the ‘80s art scene there began to blossom. He met Keith Haring, with whom he shared an apartment for two years, and Jean-Michel Basquiat. They hung out at Club 57 and the Mudd Club.

“Those were the days when they had these gigantimo openings where everyone showed up, so that the streets outside were full of people too,” recalls Scharf’s longtime friend, actress Ann Magnuson, who used to run Club 57. “When Andy Warhol arrived, then you knew that the exclamation point had been set on the sentence.”

In this case, the partying led to fame and fortune. In 1983, Scharf had his first major gallery show, with Shafrazi, and that was followed a year later with a show at Larry Gagosian in Los Angeles. Scharf’s signature images were zany cartoonish figures and tangled jungles of screaming colors.

And the closets. The first, begun in the early ‘80s, really was a closet--a walk-in closet in the apartment Scharf shared with Haring. “I was always fascinated with garbage,” Scharf admits, “so basically I started collecting garbage and started bringing in choice, odd things that I found. Then I found a black light, and put it in the room and started playing with fluorescent paint and objects.”

He and his friends hung out there, as a kind of refuge from the city. In 1982, when he had to move out of the apartment, he put everything in boxes, reusing them later for a more public “Closet #2” in his studio at P.S. 1, an artists’ exhibition and work space in Queens.

In 1985, the Whitney Biennial commissioned a Scharf installation based on the closet idea. He decorated a hallway and bathrooms in the museum, which marked a formalization of the concept, Scharf says.

“It was like, oh, a real art installation, but the spirit [of each closet] stayed the same--a place where I go into another world. Not only is the creation very cathartic and liberating, I love watching people’s reactions when they go in; it’s hard for them not to smile.”

“The Hieronymous Bosch of our Kool-Aid, sci-fi, space-age kulture,” is what the New York Times called him in 1984, a “man fully aware of the Jell-O pool that lies at society’s foundation.”

In the mid-’80s, Scharf began to feel uncomfortable in New York. “There was a period I felt I had to get out of New York,” he says. “There was too much hype. I felt I was losing my sense of self and getting carried away by the media.”

On a trip to Brazil in 1983, he had met and married Tereza Goncalves. “So I went down to Brazil and got my studio and my house [there],” he says. “I just painted, and it was really good for me, anchored me in what I’m really about--it’s not to be a star, but to make art.”

He had escaped New York before the ‘80s art scene began dissolving. His artist friends would be decimated by AIDS (Haring) and drug abuse (Basquiat). Later, Scharf and Goncalves moved back briefly to New York, but he couldn’t bear its sad memories and resettled in Miami.

“Miami seemed a good replacement for Brazil, yet was still connected to New York. It was almost like time off,” he says of the ‘90s. “After three years, it kind of hit me it was a dead end, but it took me another four years to get out.”

He looked to Los Angeles.

Inside “Closet #19” at the LACMALab is a riot of bric-a-brac--bits of toys and games, household appliances and automobile parts--and lots of fake fur attached to the walls and ceiling. Some of the bits and pieces create anthropomorphic figures, and much of the installation has been doused in yellow, blue and orange fluorescent paint highlighted by a black light. A boom box is on in one corner, playing Beatles music. Things also get recycled--the Dodge grille now at LACMA West dates to “Closet #1.”

“I can tell you where every piece is from and the stories around it,” Scharf says.

Because interactivity is part of the point of LACMALab installations, Scharf created a parallel room filled with loose objects for children to paint and arrange on shelves, to make their own installations--with a black light to illuminate their endeavors.

Scharf isn’t tired of encrusting closets, but he’s more focused these days on other directions. The development of the cartoon series, for example. The chance to do it was one of the reasons he decided to come back to L.A.

“One of the impetuses was that I’ve always wanted to do a cartoon,” he explains, and after flying back and forth trying to get a project launched, he decided that he had to live here again. Shortly after he arrived, the Cartoon Network gave him a deal to create a pilot for “The Universals.”

The story revolves around the Groovinians, artists who struggle to make money (“a very, very familiar struggle,” Scharf notes), and the Normalians, whose job is to collect money. The latter are so dull they are always starved for entertainment, while the former can make money only by providing entertainment. The characters will be computer-animated Scharf figures--goofy heads, bulbous noses, and toothy grins--dressed in space-agey ‘60s get-ups; they also include talking cats and trees.

Scharf was assigned a network writer to complete the first script, then more changes were made during storyboarding. Recently, the voices were finally recorded--with the help of friends such as Magnuson, Dennis Hopper and Paul Reubens (a.k.a. Pee-wee Herman)--and the pilot is scheduled for broadcast next year.

Over the same period of time, Scharf has been working on a series of portraits--more than two dozen are to be shown at LACE. “In Miami I was very isolated--for the most part I didn’t socialize,” he explains. “Moving here, it hit me I had a lot to talk about, and there were a lot of people here I wanted to talk to, and I felt this renewed interest in people.”

Most of the portraits are a standard size--24 by 30 inches--and each is placed in a custom-made frame. While the portraits often show recognizable people, many of them celebrities, he felt free to embellish their wardrobe and backgrounds. Some additions suggest the professional or personal life of the sitter; others are visual and verbal puns.

For example, Reubens is dressed up as a white-faced clown, a red ball on his nose, while Liza Lou is depicted against a glittering background splattered with the glass beads she uses in her artwork.

“Each one of those portraits is like a movie,” Scharf says. “They’re starring in a movie, and this is what the movie is about.”

One of the LACE exhibition works is a self-portrait. This one is 20 feet wide and incorporates not just Scharf, but his wife and two daughters, his parents and Goncalves’ parents, as well as their ancestors from 100 years ago (his as German Jews, hers as Amazonian natives) and the various houses they have shared over the decades.

Magnuson gets a portrait. She is shown as “The Vulcan Vixen”--a redhead with a beehive hairdo and pointy ears. Magnuson is not sure where the idea came from, although she shares some of Scharf’s fascination for “Star Trek.”

What marks Scharf’s works, in her estimation and that of many others, is a certain kind of joy. “He retains a sense of fun and happiness and joy about living,” says Magnuson, one that extends back to the early ‘80s in New York and survives despite time and change.

“As I’ve gotten older and been through a lot of un-fun times, I think more and more how important fun is for me,” Scarf says. “For me, fun is the child--imagination and fantasy and being able to create something from nothing. I want to keep the child inside, and I want to convey that, the wonderment, through visuals.”

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‘KENNY SCHARF,’ Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, 6522 Hollywood Blvd., L.A. Dates: Opens Saturday. Hours are Wednesday-Saturday, 12-6 p.m. Closes Jan. 26. Phone: (323) 957-1777. Also: “SEEING,” Boone Children’s Gallery, LACMA West, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., L.A. Dates: Through Sept. 2. Monday-Tuesday and Thursday, noon-8 p.m.; Friday, noon-9 p.m.; Saturday-Sunday, 11 a.m.-8 p.m. Phone: (323) 857-6000. Admission: Free.