An Optical Immersion

At Pepperdine University’s Frederick R. Weisman Museum of Art, an exhibition of 31 paintings by Julian Stanczak stands out as one of the most scintillating shows of the year. With impressive consistency, the hard-edge abstractions by the 73-year-old painter who lives in Cleveland fuse simple shapes and blazing colors to form compositions whose stylishness is charged with a jolt of sexy vulgarity. The only clunky component of the deeply satisfying survey is its title: “Julian Stanczak: Pioneer of Op Art--50 Year Retrospective.”

The plain, information-packed title compensates for the fact that Stanczak is not a household name, especially in Southern California, where he has had only two solo shows, in 1966 and 1976. Unfortunately, it also has the ring of an academic exercise, an obligatory filling-in of the historical record, which would be incomplete without a modest acknowledgment of the artist’s contribution to a seemingly short-lived movement. As if it were an entry in an old-fashioned art dictionary, the title does nothing to prepare viewers for the sophisticated vigor and up-to-the-minute currency of Stanczak’s oeuvre.

Far from being an early explorer whose achievements were eclipsed by those who followed in his footsteps, Stanczak has stuck to his guns, polishing his technical skills and refining his virtuosity as a colorist long after his style of painting has fallen out of fashion. As a whole, his exhibition demonstrates that Op Art is not a matter of style over substance, despite having been dismissed more than 30 years ago for its insistent, often rigorous superficiality. Today, with Op’s influence increasingly evident in the work of young artists, Stanczak’s show, which was organized by the Butler Institute of American Art in Youngstown, Ohio, couldn’t be more timely--or inspiring.

The first of three sensibly installed galleries charts his rapid development. Composed of bands and dots of bright color, a pair of abstract still lifes from the 1950s is equally indebted to everyday observations and the perceptual experiments of the post-Impressionists, particularly Georges Seurat.

Five canvases from the mid-1960s leave the world of depiction behind. Made of alternating bands of black and white (or complementary colors), they play tricks on your eyes by making flat surfaces appear to be billowing, undulating and warping. Classic Op images, they delight some viewers and cause others to feel queasy.

In either case, they look like preparatory studies for Stanczak’s next works, which are significantly more complex. Some of these, from the late 1960s, consist of semitranslucent layers of color that appear to have been formed when a single plane was folded back on itself. But the standout is “Anywhere-Everywhere” (1967), a 6 1/2-foot square painting of thin, zigzagging lines that end in sharp points.

Imagine what the offspring of an EKG readout and a kaleidoscope would look like and you’ll have an idea of the optical buzz generated by this electrifying painting. Its smooth, glassy surface, upon which Stanczak has lavished loads of attention, distinguishes it from most Op paintings. Nowhere is the weave of the canvas visible, leaving your eye free to glide swiftly. Tinted with Coke-bottle greens and icy blues, the white spaces between its black lines hum with cool, futuristic energy.

The remaining two galleries present a terrific selection of bigger, brighter and bolder works, all of which build on this one, often in astonishingly subtle ways. Among the most captivating are those that appear to be two or three paintings superimposed upon one another, like “Early Red” (1970) or “Low Asteroid, F” (1983). Before these masterfully orchestrated and wonderfully muscular compositions, your eye and brain play tug-of-war with each other as you try to disentangle visual perception from mental construct. What you see in the world and what takes shape in your mind’s eye collide, causing sparks to fly.

One of the most exciting aspects of the chronologically arranged exhibition is that its works keep getting better the closer they get to the present. In an upstairs gallery, a grid of 50 small panels Stanczak painted last year show him to be at the top of his game. Composed of razor-thin bands of color, each multihued silhouette of a translucent cube is a mind-bending puzzle in which logic and its opposite rub shoulders. The discipline of Josef Albers’ color studies meets the untouchable glow of video monitors, making these panels seem to belong to more than one world.

All of Stanczak’s works look as if they were made for Southern California, especially the ones in the largest gallery, whose high windows bathe them in natural light. This curious, at-home quality makes more sense when you learn of Stanczak’s peripatetic past.

Born to Jewish working-class parents in a small town in Poland, he was exiled to a labor camp in Siberia, where he contracted encephalitis and pneumonia and lost the use of his right arm in a beating. His family then made their way via India to Uganda, where they lived as refugees. Educated in London, Cleveland and at Yale (where his roommate was Op painter Richard Anuszkiewcz) Stanczak is an artist whose biography is filled with so much hardship that his paintings don’t have to be. Instead, they give form to the joy of living wholly in the moment.

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* “Julian Stanczak: Pioneer of Op Art--50 Year Retrospective,” Frederick R. Weisman Museum of Art, Pepperdine University, 24255 Pacific Coast Highway, Malibu. (310) 506-4851. Through July 22. Closed Mondays. Free admission.