An All-Embracing View of Life Emerges in Saunders’ Works

Raymond Saunders’ mixed-media paintings contain more life and spirit, energy, verve and curiosity than seems possible. Brimming with words, images and texture, they feel as perpetually unfinished, as incompletable as a diary.

“There Is but Life,” the title of one of the paintings in Saunders’ invigorating show at Hunsaker/Schlesinger Fine Art, identifies succinctly the artist’s attitude of inclusiveness, his democratic hunger for all manners of experience. Another, “The Gift of Layers,” affirms Saunders’ embrace of the emotional, physical, political, spiritual and philosophical density of life. It describes as well his formal strategy for evoking it.

Born in 1934, Saunders lives in Oakland, where he has long been on the faculty of the California College of Arts and Crafts. In his 30-plus years exhibiting in museums and galleries, curators and writers have linked him stylistically to a number of artists: Cy Twombly, for his chalkboard-like surfaces and handwritten scribbles; Robert Rauschenberg, for his incorporation of real-world objects onto the surfaces of his paintings; Jasper Johns, for his use of stenciled hearts; and Jean-Michel Basquiat, who followed Saunders’ lead in conjuring raw urbanity through casual, graffiti-like notations.

Saunders is connected to a multitude of traditions--not just visual, but also the improvisations of jazz--but his voice is singular. In each of his works we hear it, in dialogue with itself, a continuous musing on chance and intention, rawness and control, beauty and grit, immediacy and memory.

Most of the works in this show have black as their base color and are drawn over in delicate chalk line or painted over in gestural swaths and drips. Cast-off signs adhered to the panels announce the presence of a notary public, the cost of a barber’s services, the unavailability of rented rooms. Old calendars, fragments of wallpaper, sketchbook pages and old kids’ books collaged onto the surface interrupt its sense of the present with reminders of the living past.

Residue is a potent, active force, Saunders’ work attests, whether in material form or the shifting shapes of memory. Personal recollections of painting the living room when he was 7 skirt alongside images extracted from collective memory--Mickey Mouse--in the work “Jam’in” (2001). A black paint splotch in the shape of the United States is labeled as such, and white paint drips horizontally across the surface, asserting its own pattern and blotting out what’s beneath. The dissonance here yields terrific visual energy. There’s not a moment of blandness or passivity.

These recent works by Saunders are analogs of life itself--laboratories, scrapbooks, journals of being. At times tough, at times tender, they may express alienation from some aspects of the dominant culture. But mostly they embody an insistent belonging to life.

Hunsaker/Schlesinger Fine Art, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 828-1133, through Oct. 27. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Expanding the Possibilities of Space: “I’m always unhappy with something that’s too enclosed,” Helen Lundeberg said in 1983. “Maybe it’s claustrophobia.”

Lundeberg (1908-1999) spared us that discomfort in her paintings by creating images of vast depth and openness. Even images that read as interior views contain within them an escape hatch, even if it’s just a slice of distant landscape. Lundeberg’s style was crisp and cool, but not driven by descriptive accuracy. She conveyed multiple other dimensions of space--its psychological charge, its formal harmonies, its chromatic possibilities.

“Inner Visions of Outer Spaces,” a survey of Lundeberg’s work at Tobey Moss Gallery, skims through the artist’s 90 years without dwelling too long in any one place, but does contain a handful of engrossing examples within the representative swath. Coming just months after a fine show of paintings by her husband, Lorser Feitelson, at Patricia Faure Gallery, this study of Lundeberg’s work, however thin in places, helps recognize both artists’ substantial roles in the development of Modern art in Southern California.

Two bodies of work stand out: the symbolic still-lifes she began painting in the 1930s under the rubric of Post-Surrealism; and the planar, architectural semi-abstractions that peaked in the 1960s.

Lundeberg and Feitelson conceived of Post-Surrealism as a rational response to the Surrealists’ focus on the unconscious and the automatic imagery it unleashed. Her paintings in this mode bring to mind De Chirico, in their mysterious architectural settings and the evocatively placed shells, lightbulbs and framed mirrors within.

“Interior With Doorway” and “Arches I” (both 1962), epitomize Lundeberg’s signature semi-abstract style. She constructs space in these paintings through flat planes of muted olive, gray and umber, strips that suggest walls and doorways, curves that describe archways. Light and shadow, near and far, intimacy and vastness play off one another with striking effect in these distilled visions of built space.

Tobey Moss Gallery, 7321 Beverly Blvd., (323) 933-5523, through Nov. 3. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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The Debate Is Reopened: “Revival,” Micol Hebron’s first solo exhibition, reinvigorates a host of hot-button issues that dominated art-making practice and perception in the 1990s. No less relevant today, these debates about authorship, commodification and gender have, however, lost some of their urgency. Hebron’s installation jolts them back to life again.

Smart and funny, cool, clever and eminently contrived, the show is a prime act of artificial resuscitation. “Revival” consists of several dozen paintings hung salon-style on the walls of cherrydelosreyes gallery, a new enterprise consolidating the efforts of Artplace and Cherry. The images are all familiar icons from mass culture (the golden arches, Col. Sanders) and pop culture (Pokemon, Hello Kitty) to so-called high culture (paintings by Mondrian, Lichtenstein, Warhol, Johns and so on). Hebron, a recent master of fine arts graduate from UCLA, re-creates the images in colored glitter and glue on canvas, and hangs them in friendly, democratic proximity.

The room shimmers with the kitschy commercial appeal of a stall on the Venice boardwalk. Part spoof, part homage, “Revival” takes its images as givens--”readymades,” in Marcel Duchamp’s sense--elements of a common vocabulary free for the asking. They exist as preloaded raw material, ripe for recycling and reinvention with Postmodern abandon.

This vexed notion of artistic originality plays right into another muddy area: art’s questionable status as a divinely inspired mystical act. Perhaps, Hebron implies, Warhol had it right dubbing his studio “the Factory” and treating art-making as a more earthy undertaking, a form of commercial production.

If stripped of its highbrow aura, can art still maintain its privileged position over objects of lower birth? Should it?

Hebron’s installation begs these questions through its sparkling conflation of the high and low, the image born (presumably) deep inside the soul and born (admittedly) of a marketing plan. Her short video, “Pollock ’51 ‘01” (the ’51 is crossed out, as if replaced by the ‘01), delves even more deeply into the scaffold of myths supporting the art historical canon. Hebron has re-shot, with convincing sound, color and ambience, Hans Namuth’s legendary 1951 film of Jackson Pollock creating a painting on glass. Casting herself in the role of heroic artist, she takes every cue from Pollock’s actions in the original. She changes into work shoes, dangles a cigarette from her lips, stares long and hard at the panel of glass before smothering it with skeins of (in her case) glue.

How differently does the sequence read with a woman in the spotlight, rather than a man? And not just a woman painter, but one whose materials are more at home in a kindergarten classroom than an art studio?

Quite. By treating Pollock’s art-swagger as a performance to be acted, Hebron teasingly deflates the myth of the macho artist. At the same time, she deftly inserts her own persona--tough but sweet, and confident enough to laugh at herself--as a viable alternative.

cherrydelosreyes, 12611 Venice Blvd., Venice, (310) 398-7404, through Oct. 28. Open Saturdays, Sundays and by appointment.

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Dark Visions: A small show of monotypes at the 18th Street Gallery offers a glimpse of Mark Spencer’s intriguing, slightly dark vision. In each print, one figure or a small group is set within a stark landscape. In “Waiting,” an endless wall of concrete defines a generic institutional space, a setting that reeks of sterility, anonymity. The waiting figures within, a mother and two children, form a stable pyramid, an oasis of warm, patient life within the dispassionate architecture.

In most of the other images, Spencer sets the scenes in vaguely primordial space--dark, spare, the vast plains dramatically punctuated by jagged peaks. “Sacred,” like “Waiting,” features a small group seemingly on a journey. Their destination, a zigzagging mountain in the distance, doubles as a physical and spiritual goal.

Spencer’s shadowy palette and blurred contours suggest a universality and timelessness that the imagery reinforces. His figures in “Refugee Family” form a knot of hope, and in “Continuity,” a bond of protection. Primal instincts run deep here. Even when the images get excessively murky or frustratingly elusive, they still pulse with an energy fundamental to survival, of both body and spirit.

18th Street Gallery, 1639 18th St., Santa Monica, (310) 453-3711, through Nov. 2. Closed Saturdays and Sundays.