Blaber’s Touchable Art Plays Jokes on Viewers, With Enjoyable Results

With Jo Blaber’s recent paintings at the Orlando Gallery, it is not only acceptable to touch the art, it’s advisable. That’s the only way to get what she’s up to, hiding mini-paintings behind surfaces, experimenting with multiple imagery with the use of gimmickry and hinges.

The concept is clever and tied to a long-standing effort to try to bring richer image-making strategies into painting. It’s an effort that runs through Cubism’s multiple perspectives and David Salle’s coolly juxtaposed pictures. Blaber addresses the issue with a cheeky frankness, posing the question: Why not just physically attach paintings to paintings?

Fittingly, Blaber’s recent figure paintings tap unabashedly into a theme of art about art. “Checking Out David Hockney’s Pool” appears to be a fairly straightforward female nude study, but swing open the hinged canvas and you find a painting of a nude male by the pool.

Art history is coyly lurking elsewhere. A Gaugin-esque Tahitian woman is hidden in the corner of “Same Place Next Year,” and “In the Shower With Matisse” has a Matisse-like painting hidden behind an outwardly visible nude. Art games are being played here, mostly with enjoyable outcomes.

The other half of Blaber’s exhibition veers somewhere else entirely. Her landscape studies of rugged plant life, cactus and spiky century plants are seen against skies reddened by either sunset, sunrise or unexplained infernos. These paintings express honesty and revel in the act of painting nature, whereas her hinged art seems like an experiment in progress, an idea whose time and refinement may not quite have come.

In stark contrast to Blaber’s hardware-adorned art is the work of an artist known simply as Burt, also showing in the gallery this month. Look past the glib, punning show title, “It’s a Relief,” and you find a series of oddly alluring and thought-provoking abstract relief sculptures.

A Vietnam veteran, Burt makes at least passing reference to his experience, sometimes applying bamboo frames to his works or darkly ironic titles such as “Detour--Uncle Ho’s Trail.” Evidence of things gone wrong is undeniably part of the picture with this work, but dysfunction mixes in with a search for beauty.

Burt’s art seems to echo the sleek, slick plexiglass relief concoctions of Craig Kaufman, whose work recently was seen in the huge, controversial “Made in California” exhibit at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Synthetic appearances rule, with glossy plastic surfaces and sunburst color effects that remind us of car detailing. But the gloss is compromised and complicated by a sense of mutation.

The elemental shapes that protrude from the surface are irregular and bulbous but convey a private beauty.

It is the gangly, almost wart-like presence that gives the work distinction. The weird singularity of these pieces produces an unexpected elegance despite the ostensible ugliness at hand. You want to touch it. But don’t.

BE THERE

“Figures in the Landscape” by Jo Blaber and “It’s a Relief” by Burt through March 30 at Orlando Gallery, 18376 Ventura Blvd., Tarzana. Hours: 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday. (818) 705-5368.