Jim Isermann, the Playful Wallpaperer

Since 1980, Jim Isermann has designed, built and exhibited just about everything anyone could want for a home: rugs, chairs, tables, drapes, TV consoles, light fixtures, stained-glass windows, boldly patterned paintings and cozy, fabric-covered sculptures. Over the last five years, the Palm Springs-based artist has expanded the scale of his works to include such public spaces as the entryways, interiors and facades of galleries and museums.

His latest installation, at UCLA’s Hammer Museum, transforms the lobby and front windows of the inhospitable office building into an inspiring playground for the imagination.

Around the marble stairway that takes visitors from street level to the second-floor galleries, Isermann has affixed vinyl wallpaper whose abstract pattern is at once wildly complicated and rigorously consistent. It consists of snugly abutted squares and rectangles that resemble empty picture frames or the borders of 35-millimeter slides, with rounded outer corners and right-angled inner edges.

Each shape comes in three sizes: small, medium and large. Most come in one of six colors: red, yellow, blue, purple, green and orange. Some are two-tone, combining red and purple, yellow and blue, or green and orange. A few squares and rectangles are made up of three colors.

Initially, Isermann’s wallpaper appears to be a chaotic array of blocky figure eights interspersed with innumerable zeros, like some kind of newfangled computer code. But if your mind is able to wrap itself around several ideas simultaneously, you’ll eventually see that the shapes follow a horizontal pattern, and the colors repeat themselves vertically.

A gallery brochure with a terrific essay by 2002 MacArthur Fellow Dave Hickey includes a helpful photograph of a much larger installation of Isermann’s wallpaper. It’s easier to see its pattern when it was installed in 1999 at the Centre National d’Art Contemporain in Grenoble, France--an enormous steel-and-glass structure that was designed by A.G. Eiffel and is believed to be the factory where the Eiffel Tower was built. At the Hammer, so few repetitions take place that it’s more difficult to discern the pattern’s logic.

But that’s part of Isermann’s point. His installation is one of those rare works of art that makes you wish it were bigger. Not because it’s not doing its job at its current size, but because its surroundings would be so much more beautiful if the color-saturated design extended beyond its borders.

From two blocks away, the wallpaper in the front windows is as sexy as a flash of skin glimpsed between a shirt’s undone buttons or a peek of flesh revealed when a skirt swooshes above a pair of stockings. In this frame of mind, Isermann’s fun-loving installation provides pure visual stimulation.

From another perspective it’s suffused with melancholy. Its bittersweet poignancy comes through when it makes you wonder why the built environment around it is so hopelessly ugly.

Isermann neither tries to shrink public spaces down to the size of domestic rooms nor settles for filling museums with corporate-scaled monstrosities. His city-scaled wallpaper blows most art away by showing that idiosyncrasy and order can go hand in hand--if handled with the right combination of talent and intelligence.

UCLA Hammer Museum, 10899 Wilshire Blvd., Westwood, (310) 443-7000, through Dec. 29. Closed Mondays. Free admission to lobby. Parking $2.75 with validation.

Bell’s Recycling Project

Becomes a Potent Series

In terms of square inches, Larry Bell’s “New Fractions” are about four times the size of his old ones. In terms of visual impact, they’re about 10 times more potent. Each of the Taos, N.M.-based artist’s 20-by-20-inch works on paper commands so much space that three fill a wall at Kiyo Higashi Gallery, where 30 or more of the earlier versions once hung comfortably.

In 1995, Bell began to rip a series of 1980s paintings from their stretcher bars. He then cut these canvases, which had been treated with thin layers of light-sensitive emulsion, into matchbook-size bits. A few years before paper shredders became common features of corporate offices, he treated a significant part of his oeuvre as if it were a document in need of destruction.

But Bell the recycler got the better of Bell the shredder. Rather than discarding the cut-up bits and pieces of his paintings, he sorted them into similarly tinted piles. This became his palette, from which he selected handfuls of fragments, arranged them on small sheets of watercolor paper and then ran the collages through a laminating press.

The machine’s pressure and heat melted the various elements, melding the abstract shapes into evocative compositions. Sometimes, translucent layers blended together. At other times, they repelled one another, like oil on water.

From 1996 to 2001, Bell made more than 12,000 of these works. In many, iridescent halos and shimmering swirls of color had the presence of thumbnail mirages. Others seemed to be windows onto a microscopic cosmos, a tiny world into which it was easy to fall.

Although still modest in size, his “New Fractions” do not function like miniatures. More closely matched to the scale of the human body, each feels more earthbound and less dreamy, suffused with less fantasy and more reality. Greater detail increases their immediacy, in which beauty and violence fuse seamlessly.

Fiery oranges, smoky blacks and twisted, metallic shards give them the force of explosions. Many have melted to form circular puddles, suggesting a post-apocalyptic world dissolving into even tinier particles. Whatever one sees in Bell’s indeterminate images, they haunt the mind’s eye--long into the night.

Kiyo Higashi Gallery, 8332 Melrose Ave., L.A., (323) 655-2482, through Sept. 7. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Koplin Group Show Takes

an Academic Approach

This year’s installment of Koplin Gallery’s biannual summer group show is less rambunctious and rough-around-the-edges than previous versions. Although a jolt of self-deprecatory humor can be found in a handful of the 91 works on paper by 44 artists in “Drawings VI,” the show as a whole is notable for its sober, often solemn atmosphere.

As was the case two years ago, realistic depictions of the human body predominate, with earnest renditions of anonymous individuals outnumbering portraits of specific sitters. Each of the four walls in the main gallery is anchored by an outstanding example of contemporary Realism.

On the back wall, Bill Vuksanovich’s three portraits of ordinary folks standing before blank backdrops are virtuoso demonstrations of the power of direct observation. They give stunning form to the richness of everyday details.

On the opposite wall, three portraits by A.J. Smith bring a bit of soft-focus sentimentality into the picture, casting the trio of youngsters into the forgiving mists of memory.

In contrast, Kerry James Marshall’s 5-foot-tall conte crayon drawing of a nude women reclining against the bank of a forest pond dispenses with fussy details to capture the moonlit magic--and physical vitality--of the muscular swimmer. Her modestly crossed legs make her look like a mermaid.

Across the gallery, Domenic Cretara takes a more classical, less romanticized approach in two figure studies. Using red chalk to sketch delicate lines, she captures the warmth and softness of living flesh.

Other standouts include David Bailin’s loosely rendered image of a nude communicating with mysterious natural forces, Robert Schultz’s subtly shaded women lost in thought or locking their eyes on viewers, and Aaron Smith’s tender depictions of self-absorbed youths.

A small back gallery features images of animals, which are meant to stand in as human surrogates. But aside from Fred Stonehouse’s and John Frame’s comic-strip-inspired stories, and Tom Knechtel’s gorgeous pictures of a pig and a water buffalo, these images are too lightweight to be memorable.

Some truly funny works fuse masterful draftsmanship and wickedly silly narratives. Thomas Stubbs’ charcoal, chalk and pastel drawings of sleeping nudes visited by Lilliputian figures and barnyard beasts have the queasy presence of illustrations for twisted children’s books. F. Scott Hess’ colored pencil drawings of a woman with a whip and another looking over her shoulder are accompanied by handwritten stories at once hilarious and macabre.

Hung alongside Chris Finley’s mutant cartoons, even Rico Lebrun’s old-fashioned “Minotaur”(from 1961) seems strangely contemporary--less heavy-handed in its mimicry of Picasso and De Kooning than usual. More unexpected juxtapositions like this would shake some of the dust off the installation, whose uniformity is unnecessarily academic.

Koplin Gallery, 464 N. Robertson Blvd., L.A., (310) 657-9843, through Sept. 7. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Millei’s Paintings Are

Thick With ‘Flowers’

Part of art’s job is to confuse viewers--to present us with such unexpected objects and experiences that we have to change the way we think to make sense of them. All too often, however, artists mistake art’s means for its ends: They assume that their works only have to be confusing to be interesting.

At Ace Gallery, John Millei’s new oils on canvas fall into this trap. Although they pile up enough painterly maneuvers on their juicy surfaces to confuse viewers about their purposes, they lack resolution.

In the seven large, abstract images that belong to a body of work titled “The Real Life of Flowers,” the L.A. painter appears to be spinning his wheels, going through the motions of laying on paint thickly and deeply out of sheer habit. Most of his approximately 7-by-6-foot canvases give with one hand and take away with the other.

After covering each canvas with brightly colored fields punctuated by stylized flowers and organic squiggles, Millei slathers over most of them with a dense layer of dark paint that has the deadening presence of tar or lava.

He sometimes rakes these amorphous blobs with a comb-like tool, carving furrows into their surfaces. At other times he drags his paint-loaded brush across various sections, crossing out whatever is under them. When he does this, he manages to make oil paint look as if it’s made of melted plastic, like cheap tubes of acrylic.

Unfortunately, Millei’s blotted-out paintings too closely resemble Julian Schnabel’s similarly configured images. With one foot firmly planted in the New Yorker’s tired gestures and the other in Charles Arnoldi’s bland abstractions, Millei leaves himself too little room to do his own thing. Either more or less confusion is needed if this body of work is to have enough traction to take viewers somewhere.

Ace Gallery, 5514 Wilshire Blvd., L.A., (323) 935-4411, through September. Closed Sundays and Mondays.