Freewheeling Doodles Gain Mature Depth With Color

Much like the snapshot, the doodle is a common but democratic branch of a rarefied medium. It’s also a potent impulse in contemporary drawing and painting. Though it’s been a source of inspiration throughout Modernity (and arguably earlier), it emerges more often today, particularly among younger artists, as a central aesthetic preoccupation, a mode of expression unto itself.

Nina Bovasso’s recent work, on view at Richard Heller Gallery, is a case in point. A lively mix of drawing, painting and collage, the show embodies the freewheeling spirit of the doodle, revealing its attributes and its drawbacks.

About half the 31 works on display are given over to one particular doodle--a simple, childlike version of Snoopy--that multiplies as wildly and randomly across the paper as the cells of some ravenous disease. Rendered in pointedly amateurish pencil and ballpoint ink, the drawings bring to mind the high school binders, telephone books and desk calendars that we’ve all defaced in bouts with boredom over the years. But they don’t shine much light on the experience; they simply mimic its compulsion.

Though there is something admittedly impressive about the drawings’ manic propagation of banality and something appropriate about the irrationality of the process, the effect is ultimately limited by its lack of aesthetic or conceptual ambition. With the addition of color, however, a deeper understanding reveals itself.

In Bovasso’s paintings--which are almost entirely abstract, though they incorporate formal echoes of the Snoopy figure--the solipsistic tendencies of the doodle give way slightly (not a lot, but enough) to the formal traditions of abstraction. The result is a series of images that manage to be both spontaneous and balanced, free-form and coherent, animated and meaningful.

Particularly outstanding are the two largest paintings. Exuberant and vaguely sexual explosions of wildly girlish color, bolstered by a clever sense of pattern, repetition and balance, these works amplify the spirit of free-form, spontaneous pattern to symphonic proportions.

Richard Heller Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 453-9191, through Dec. 15. Closed Sunday and Monday.

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Delicate and Inquisitive: Moving through the 30 small pencil drawings in Joseph Biel’s exhibition at Roberts & Tilton is like exploring a deserted storehouse in the artist’s imagination without a guide. It isn’t a chaotic place; each jewel-like image is individually preserved in its own frame, as spare and clean as an archeological artifact. But there’s no pretense of rational organization. There are no labels or codes and no hint of any general schema, whether narrative or conceptual.

Nearly all the figures in the drawings are male, bald and inhumanly passive. Many of the situations are unemotionally violent (one man has a meat cleaver lodged in his scull; another swan-dives with a slack noose around his neck). Others are banal but inexplicable (one man sits at a table piled high with small bones; a disembodied hand holds another man’s nose).

The exploration and wholesale exposure of an artist’s visual imagination isn’t an inherently interesting endeavor--indeed, it can become dangerously self-indulgent when not tempered by a broader emotional, artistic or political context--so one’s response to these drawings depends a great deal on one’s sympathy with Biel’s particular idiosyncrasies.

The annals of the quirky, cartoon-fed, boyish imagination are hardly unexplored territory (the work of Marcel Dzama is a particularly apt comparison), and their resources may ultimately prove limited. But in this case and at this point in its evolution--perhaps because it is a new series--the work is fresh and enthrallingly inquisitive. (Biel’s background is in installation and performance work rather than drawing.)

Perhaps more important, they’re lovely drawings. Biel has a delicate hand and a charming way with line that renders even the simplest forms engaging enough to ease the viewer happily through the lot.

Roberts & Tilton, 6150 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles, (323) 459-0224, through Dec. 15. Closed Sunday and Monday.

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Light Sources: In her current exhibition at Patricia Faure Gallery, Blue McRight brings many of the concerns of her public light-sculptures down to a domestic scale, with limited but intriguing results.

The show features about a dozen slender, reed-like forms made from shiny aluminum tubing, each of which expands at one end into an oblong cocoon of wire mesh that houses a single light source. Some of the pieces rise from the floor like flower stalks, their elliptical heads bowing downward. The rest hang from the ceiling in elegant curves that taper off within two to six feet of the ground.

The objects themselves are a curious fusion of organic form and hip urban finish. They imply the promise of life, whether it be vegetal, insectival or extraterrestrial, and create an exquisitely consuming atmospheric effect in the darkened gallery. The mesh casings throw massive nets of shadow across the walls, enclosing the viewer in an embrace that feels both predatory and protective, while fragments of external sound float through the nets like particles of sea life.

Were they to be separated and installed in a different context, however, the objects might easily be mistaken for a series of stylish lighting fixtures, more fit for a fashionable new bar than for a museum--which might not be such a bad thing, if McRight happens to be inclined in that direction. One senses that participation in an intelligently designed architectural environment would bring the works a more complete sense of purpose.

As it is, however, the show is a compelling exploration of form, light and atmosphere that seems to be suspended in an experimental or intermediary stage. Because the path that McRight is attempting to forge is such a promising one--winding between fine art and design, large and small scale, the public and the private realm, the organic and the high tech--it’s probably best to overlook the limitations of its early stages.

Patricia Faure Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 449-1479, through Dec. 15. Closed Sunday and Monday.

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Sensual Focus: The exhibition of photographs from Jessica Bronson’s “Panamint Series” makes a solid debut for Lemon Sky Projects, a new gallery and fine art publishing venture started by Jane Hart and Robert Grahmbeek (both formerly of Muse [X] Editions). The 10 photographs on display aren’t new--several appeared in Bronson’s video installation at Cal State L.A. last fall; others in exhibitions in San Antonio and New York--but they come together here for the first time and offer a particularly focused, if relatively narrow, glimpse into her subject.

Each work is a diptych of images taken in Death Valley with a wide-angle lens that bends the horizon line into a graceful arc. In some of the works, it bows downward, leaving mostly sky. In others, it bows upward, causing the dry ground to swell like a pregnant belly.

Bronson’s focus in each work is less the actual nature of the landscape, which she effectively abstracts in her distortions, than the potency of that horizon line. It weaves a graceful S-curve through some pairs, a soft W-like ripple in others and twice splits to form the elliptical shape of an eye. The line sharpens in places with the glare of white-hot daylight and burns with the fire of sunset in others. It can be hard, masculine and stubborn or graceful and willowy. The best of the images are tinged with crisp sensuality akin to that of Georgia O’Keeffe’s Southwestern works.

Though it would be fair to say that the video component of Bronson’s “Panamint Series”--which animates the bowing of the horizon line through the use of a slowly swinging camera--makes for a more singularly impressive experience than the still photographs, they hardly suffer in isolation. Rather they allow for an appreciation of the steadiness of Bronson’s photographic eye and serve to illuminate the sense of stillness that ultimately permeates the video work.

Lemon Sky Projects, 5367 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles, (323) 931-6664, through Dec. 22. Closed Sundays and Mondays.