‘Phigment’ Is Missing the Big Picture

Not punny. And not particularly compelling or insightful either.

On view at the Irvine Fine Arts Center through April 14, “Phigment” is a dissatisfying show of staged images by six photographers who fall prey to their own visual jokiness and overly intellectualized aesthetics.

The show’s title apparently blends “photograph” with “figment,” meaning a photograph of something imagined or artificial. The photographers--Oliver Boberg, Miles Coolidge, Allan DeSouza, David DiMichele, Eva Leitolf and David Levinthal--aim to rattle viewer perceptions with their arranged and photographed objects and false settings.

Sometimes they are successful in their tease.

But the larger question is “So what?”

Mostly the resultant images are slick but blah-blah bland--over-thought and under-executed.

Boberg’s small, spare images of buildings and outdoor sites are in fact sets, created by the photographer to look deceptively real.

These oddly flat compositions are a tad unsettling. There’s no question that something is missing--that there is no there there--as Gertrude Stein once said of Oakland.

Yet the visual trickery hardly matters. Boberg’s work is such subtle sleight of hand that it merely seems pretty and facile. The images don’t grab. The mental exertion and meticulous execution don’t matter.

DiMichele and DeSouza contribute the loudest “say what?” of the show.

Full of strident forms and colors, DiMichele’s faux gallery scenes are a minor hoot.

In his “Avant-garde and Kitsch 4” a dozen or so collaged-in gallery-goers peruse three irritatingly patterned paintings in heavily adorned frames, plus a giant metallic cat sculpture and one of a baby-faced clown.

This artwork is awful. Yet some of DiMichele’s people raptly ponder it--while others pose as if they too were on display in this garish, seen-and-be-seen world.

DeSouza’s prints are the most oddball of the show. At first they appear to be endless sand dunes with reeds sticking out in weird places. Linger and they look more like hairy human skin and nipples.

Yet their arrangement of forms is nothing special. Just a nice trompe l’oeil touch.

Cowboy myth is the core of Levinthal’s shadowy, golden-hued Wild West images, made with dolls representing romantic gunslingers. A cool concept, but Levinthal “shot” the doll-shadows simply and frontally. There’s little to keep our eyes intrigued.

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Least successful are the prints of Coolidge and Leitolf, who photograph fake environments that exist in real life.

Coolidge presents a real-life simulated town called “Safetyville,” where children are taught safety strategies. Its building facades seem straight from the fake town in the movie “The Truman Show.” Yet the images themselves feel so emotionally void they are almost meaningless.

Leitolf has photographed dioramas in a natural-history museum, personalizing scenes of flora and fauna with her choices of angle and light. Nothing in her museum views is strange enough or savvy enough to pull the work above rote reportage.

All the “Phigment” photographers are seasoned, well-schooled and well-credentialed, with dozens of exhibitions under their belts.

Perhaps too well-schooled.

Their intentions--to use the supposedly truthful medium of photography to create faux realities, illusions and visual double-takes--seem overly effete and art-school derivative.

And intellectual pretensions by themselves do not create an engaging gallery experience. Despite the mind games behind it, “Phigment” fizzles.

SHOW TIMES

“Phigment,” Irvine Fine Arts Center, 14321 Yale Ave. Mondays-Thursdays, 9 a.m.-9 p.m; Fridays, 9 a.m.-5 p.m.; Saturdays, 9 a.m.-3 p.m.; Sundays, 1-5 p.m. Free. Through April 14. (949) 724-6880.