Publicity Photo Collection Suggests All Is Not Glossy

Imagine a family photo album put together by someone whose closest relationships and fondest memories do not involve friends and relatives but stars and celebrities he’s never met. This gives you an idea of what it’s like to visit Richard Prince’s disturbingly poignant exhibition at Regen Projects, where the New York artist has framed publicity photographs in clusters that resemble the pages of a blown-up scrapbook.

Alternating waves of disdain and pathos roll over a viewer who spends more than a few moments with these cheap glossies. At one level, they represent a pathetic retreat from the trials and tribulations--and satisfactions--of real relationships with real people in the real world. In the fantasyland they map, time stands still: Beautiful people don’t live happily ever after as much as they leave the drudgery of everyday life behind, becoming larger-than-life-size myths whose every gesture is loaded with significance--at least for adoring fans.

The interior lives of most adults, however, are not stuck in adolescence. Being pragmatic people, Americans have very little sympathy for such shameless escapism. We look down on individuals whose lives are consumed by mass-produced fantasies.

At the same time, Prince’s collection of autographed pictures sends a chill down your spine. His series recalls what often emerges in the aftermath of school shootings, when newspapers publish evidence that paints sad pictures of lonely misfits who suffered silently before lashing out violently.

The obvious difference between his art and the profiles that follow such frequent tragedies is that no newsworthy violence precedes Prince’s cataloging of his supposedly private fantasy life. As a work of art, its relationship to reality is ambiguous. As an artist, Prince is both the observer and the observed, the journalist and the story, the psychoanalyst and the patient.

His compilation of photos is less a self-portrait than an incisive sampling of America’s fascination with celebrity. Where the ancient Greeks had their gods, we’ve got movie stars, pop stars and supermodels.

Individual works are often organized by oddly modern archetypes. In the category of bare-chested men appear Val Kilmer, Ozzy Osbourne, Sid Vicious and Sylvester Stallone: a foursome who wouldn’t be seen dead together. Other categories include men on motorcycles, women on motorcycles, models in cowboy hats and vixens in swimming pools. One of the most touching works depicts artist Cindy Sherman, master of disguises, sitting beneath Raquel Welch, Xena the Warrior Princess, Carrie-Anne Moss (from “The Matrix”) and a forgotten starlet from the 1970s.

In Prince’s pantheon, there’s a lot more sex than violence. Teen idols tease; femme fatales gaze icily; Playboy bunnies bare their breasts and biker chicks strip. Lust and desire jockey for position, as class boundaries are crossed. What was risque for one generation is passe for the next. The only constant is that glamour and tragedy always end up together.

* Regen Projects, 629 N. Almont Drive, West Hollywood, (310) 276-5424, through April 7. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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In the Real World: Rebecca Morales’ paintings of the desert landscape around El Centro, Calif., may have begun as meditations on the border between the U.S. and Mexico. But these exquisite pictures of the inhospitable no-man’s land of the Jacumba and Yuha deserts go far beyond this worthy political subject. Using immigration as a metaphor for art’s capacity to function as a point of transition between different worlds, they infuse their surroundings with so much visual intensity that reality seems to be endowed with a spiritual dimension.

Desert spiritualism is a hackneyed cliche. It is so closely associated with Santa Fe, N.M., tourism and Georgia O’Keeffe-style abstraction that most serious artists cringe when it’s mentioned in relation to their work. Morales’ paintings avoid this pitfall by maintaining an unflinching fidelity to the real world.

At Koplin Gallery, five long, horizontal paintings and five vertically oriented triptychs have the clarity and vividness of panoramic photographs. But these oils on aluminum panel are too luminous and sensual to be mistaken for mechanically produced prints. The way sunlight falls across the desolate landscape is their focus, bathing the sand, scrub and distant mountains in a warm glow while casting cool blue shadows behind and below.

Also extraordinary in their detail are 10 studies on torn sheets of vellum. Painted with gouache and watercolor, these impeccable pictures of dead birds and snakes (tangled in strands of yarn, string and other nesting materials) treat every feather and thread as if it were a world unto itself, an object of devotion worthy of the most painstaking scrutiny. Like an old-fashioned memento mori, they invite us to reflect on our mortality.

However, a whiff of morbidity diminishes the impact of Morales’ animal studies. Their balance between scientific precision and spiritual sentiment is not as precisely calibrated as it is in her landscapes. Even her triptychs, whose elongated ovals recall Italian altarpieces, are so fantastically accurate that they don’t ask you to believe anything you can’t see for yourself. The marvels of the real world provide ample material for Morales’ glorious art, in which seemingly transcendent splendors take shape right before your eyes.

* Koplin Gallery, 464 N. Robertson Blvd., West Hollywood, (310) 657-9843, through April 14. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Courage and Conviction: A tour de force of humanism, Magdalena Abakanowicz’s exhibition at Grant Selwyn Fine Art treats the human body as if it’s a hollowed-out shell or petrified carcass.

Nothing is uglier or more profoundly disturbing than seeing such denigration occur in the world--during wars, famines and other types of cruelty that could be prevented if we were only more reasonable. In Abakanowicz’s hands, however, unconscionable suffering is not the end of the story. It is the fertile, all-too-available soil out of which human dignity grows.

In the world bodied forth by her epic art, life is a caldron in which the strength of one’s will is mercilessly tested, measured against inspiring ideals and the examples of individuals you look up to. Monuments to anonymous heroes, Abakanowicz’s bronze sculptures bear witness to people who refuse to be victims, even when fate conspires to leave no alternative.

Although her fragmented figures, which often lack limbs and are always headless, look as if they’ve been to hell and back, their gnarled, organic forms exude an implacable calm. The exhibition’s centerpiece consists of 20 cast pieces that resemble the backs of slightly larger-than-life-size figures seated on the floor. Neither cowering, curling up in the fetal position nor clinging to one another for a final touch of succor, each appears to have faced unimaginable terror by bowing his or her head and looking inward.

Their curved backs, shoulders and buttocks recall the shields of ancient warriors. This indicates the unsentimental toughness at the heart of Abakanowicz’s art. Likewise, a row of six standing figures turns its back to viewers, suggesting both vulnerability and defiance. Silently attesting to the courage that must accompany convictions if they’re to have a fighting chance, her raw works sidestep life’s niceties to get to its essence.

* Grant Selwyn Fine Art, 341 N. Canon Drive, Beverly Hills, (310) 777-2400, through April 14. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Blue, Taken Straight: Barnett Newman once said that 10 feet of blue was bluer than 10 inches of blue. James Hayward’s blues are bluer than that.

At Chac Mool Gallery, his furiously churned surfaces of screaming cobalt blue, vibrant forest green and dense chocolaty brown feel as if they’re as deep as the ocean. They make you think that you’ve never seen these colors before. And, if you don’t pay attention, may never see them again.

Even more amazing is the veteran painter’s capacity to get a viewer to experience black and gray as if they were full, sumptuous colors, splendid hues as beautiful, sensuous and ravishing as any of those in the rainbow.

Although the tints of Hayward’s exhibition tend toward the somber, the earthen and the organic, the tone of the show is joyous. Not merely festive, like a pretty good party, but flat-out, full-bore, no-hold’s-barred celebratory--the unmitigated type based in the conviction that life isn’t lived when anything’s held back.

Until fairly recently, Hayward added melted wax to his oil paints, working swiftly (over a hot stove) to slather the viscous mixture on a canvas before it cooled and congealed into frosting-like swathes. In his new works, he dispenses with the wax.

The difference is comparable to that between a blended whiskey mixed with water and a fine single malt. Straight oil paint increases the juiciness of Hayward’s works, intensifies their chromatic punch and makes them look as if they’re still wet--so freshly painted that the thick impasto of their monochrome surfaces appears to be more liquid than solid. A pleasure to behold, their supersaturated colors make the rest of the world look pale and slightly faded.

* Chac Mool Gallery, 8920 Melrose Ave., West Hollywood, (310) 550-6792, through March 30. Closed Sundays and Mondays.