All-Too-Human Moments in the Kienholzes’ Drawings

The comparison sounds derogatory, but it’s not: Ed and Nancy Kienholz’s wrenching work has the nasty, necessary character of a scab. There’s always a wound or pain of some sort at its essence, beneath an overlying crust formed by time. Healing, in its own obtuse way, the work is still somewhat rude and unsightly. It is difficult but darkly appealing. Just beneath its surface courses human lifeblood.

Tableaux made by the Kienholzes--Ed since the early 1960s, Nancy joining him in 1972--are condensed, compacted environments hovering between the literal and the symbolic. They derive from memories, from glimpses into desolate lives, and they deliver back pungent opportunities for the same. The most recent Kienholz retrospective passed through L.A. in 1996, and now at L.A. Louver is another type of survey, billed as the first ever exhibition of their “Tableau Drawings.”

Drawings, as Marco Livingstone aptly points out in the show’s thoughtful catalog, are generally assumed to reside on paper and be preparatory, or at least secondary to an artist’s more fully realized work. The Kienholzes’ tableau drawings were made after the environments or larger pieces to which they relate, and they have nothing to do with the flat neutrality of paper. They are spatial sketches, negotiations of tone and texture made from materials left over when a piece was completed.

There are residual nuggets here from some of the Kienholzes’ most powerful works, like “The Bronze Pinball Machine With Woman Affixed Also” (1980), which made blatant the sexualized aggression of game-playing young men; “The Hoerengracht” (1983-88), an extended lament over the bleak, sorrowful lives of Dutch prostitutes; and “Sollie 17” (1979-80), a Hopper-like portrait of loneliness, minus the romanticizing glow of soft, golden light.

The drawing for “Sollie 17” is the only work here that crosses over fully from the wall to the viewer’s real, experiential space. Like the larger tableau it refers to, it contains fragments of the material world--a bed frame, wallpaper, an exit sign, a bare lightbulb--that are contrived in their arrangement to intensify their desperate, melancholic charge.

Remarkably, a small neighboring work, Ed Kienholz’s drawing for his landmark environmental tableau, “The Beanery” (1965), emits just as assaultive a psychic jolt while measuring barely over a foot square and hardly emerging from the wall. It consists of a hand (he had just started casting figures from life the year before) resting on a plastic-entombed newspaper with the headline “Children Kill Children in Viet Nam Riots.” A stopped clock, doubling as the hand’s wrist, immediately triggers associations with the truncated lives of the newspaper story.

Clocks appear regularly in the Kienholzes’ work, as stark reminders of time’s urgency, of time relentlessly passing, time lost, wasted and wasting. Not all of the tableau drawings have the self-sufficiency of these two, but the show is rich in characteristic, Kienholzian moments of poignancy, despair, shame and self-awareness.

* L.A. Louver, 45 N. Venice Blvd., Venice, (310) 822-4955, through March 31. Closed Sunday and Monday.

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Elemental: Part memorial, part meditation space, Douglas Bohr’s evocative installation at Cherry Gallery brings together earth, air, water and--seemingly an element unto itself--human consciousness.

Bohr, who lives in Winston-Salem, N.C., and is exhibiting for the first time in California, has carved five rough vessels out of wood and placed them in a jagged line on the floor, each nested in a circle of chips and shavings hewn from it. Across each bowl spans a length of vellum with words hand-printed across it: experience, knowledge, memory, place, name, belief. The words appear in lowercase, in the straightforward font of typewritten text, and carry the authority of givens, absolutes, from the set of qualities that distinguish humans from unconscious nature.

It is a force of nature, however, that begins to break down that surety: Water, pooled in each vessel atop the paper, and dripping sporadically from the ceiling, causes the letters to spot and bleed, compromising their integrity as shapes and gently eroding their fixity as concepts. The element of air intervenes in the form of human breath, conscious and rhythmic, sounding through speakers embedded in the gallery’s side walls. The fundamental sound of life is interspersed with the quiet recitation of names of people who have died.

Bohr’s work feels like an offering of sorts, a tribute to the preciousness of time, and to the interdependent work of the vessels of mind, body and earth. Bringing together the elements of the installation so suggestively, Bohr sets the stage for deeper, private pondering on the nature of mortality and eternity, what lasts and what matters.

* Cherry Gallery, 2411 Glencoe Ave., Venice, (310) 880-2790, through March 25. Open Saturday and Sunday, and by appointment.

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Still Waters: An image of a breakwater, one of David Fokos’ six utterly beautiful photographs at Paul Kopeikin Gallery, not only typifies the artist’s Minimalist style, but emblematizes well the philosophy underlying his approach to picture-making. Like the wall in the photograph, which separates the sea from a sheltered cove, Fokos tames what is chaotic, turbulent, vast and random--the visual field--and renders it calm, ordered, contained. He creates a safe haven for contemplation or simply pure reverie.

Stunning in their simplicity and elegance, Fokos’ large, black-and-white prints picture primarily the sea, but an altered sea--one whose texture and motion have been calmed into pristine flatness by long exposure time. Ripples and waves have melted into one another, into the uniform smoothness of a level plane, and the only indication of rough waters is an occasional swirl of white, like that edging the breakwater.

Fokos has pared down these seascapes to their geometric essence: plane, line, point. In each serene view, the stripe of sky stays uninterrupted, but the sea might contain a row of posts or a pair of stones, invested with monumental attention, like the stones of the Japanese rock garden of Ryoanji. Editing out the color, clutter and noise of daily existence, Fokos frames a zone of absolute peace and quiet. His photographs are welcome moments of reprieve, visual sanctuaries in black, white and gray.

* Paul Kopeikin Gallery, 138 N. La Brea Ave., (323) 937-0765, through April 3. Closed Monday and Tuesday.

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Figuring It Out: The eye might gravitate to Carlos Estrada-Vega’s paintings for their vibrant color, but the mind latches on to them as curious puzzles to be figured out, decoded. Their format appears simple enough: All are compositions based on the modular unit of the square. Some squares pair up to form rectangles, some quadruple to form larger squares, set among the smaller.

The basic structure brings to mind Mondrian and any number of other grid-based abstractionists finessing the boundary between system and intuition. But Estrada-Vega’s work has a serious quirk that sets it apart. The title of his show at Hunsaker/Schlesinger Fine Art, “About 8,000 Paintings,” gives it away. Each of the colored squares in these paintings is actually a separate painting in itself, a chunk of wood--some as small as a half-inch square--sheathed in canvas and painted a solid color. Estrada-Vega implants a magnetic core into each of the micro-paintings, then assembles anywhere from 25 to more than 1,000 of the small canvases onto a metal panel that, in turn, fastens to a magnet on the wall.

An intriguing conceit, to be sure, and Estrada-Vega’s paintings derive quite a bit of their vigor from the labor-intensity of this process--but, thankfully, not all of it. Dense with both the purposeful concentration of work and the improvisational spirit of play, the paintings strike a delicate balance between the two impulses. They verge on the programmatic, but never succumb to its predictability.

Estrada-Vega keeps the surfaces alive by sometimes varying the depth of the individual canvases, so that the surface plane of the unified work is actually faceted and slightly discontinuous. His palette is equally jaunty and jazzy, with teal bumping up against brick, eggshell neighboring rose. Khaki, emerald, tangerine, slate, crimson, aqua, pumpkin, royal blue and hundreds more idiosyncratic hues stake their claims to separate squares, but collaborate peaceably, either toward unified harmonies or, better yet, toward spunky, syncopated rhythms.

* Hunsaker/Schlesinger Fine Art, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 828-1133, through March 31. Closed Sunday and Monday.