Photos of Drawings of Photos: DiCaprio Twice Removed

The relationship between a portrait artist and a sitter is always loaded, but it’s even more strangely skewed through the lens of modern celebrity. An Italian Renaissance or English Baroque painter began with the human experience of a direct encounter with the subject. Today, an artist begins with the fractured experience of an image forged through the shifting kaleidoscope of mass media, then layers in a direct encounter afterward.

In “Amy Adler Photographs Leonardo DiCaprio,” the young Los Angeles artist pictures her superstar contemporary in a manner at once forthright and remote, immediate and detached. DiCaprio seems there and not-there, both a presence and an absence. The same goes for Amy Adler. Not since Warhol has an artist figured out how to vivify so well the debased mass-media imagery of a movie star, turning it to illuminating ends.

Appropriately, the six large Cibachrome prints at the UCLA Hammer Museum have been given an elegant installation in a gallery that recalls the apse of a chapel. They derive from a photo shoot the artist arranged with the actor last year, when both were living in London. Adler photographed DiCaprio, as is her method, and then made pastel drawings from the photographs. Next she photographed the drawings. Finally she destroyed the original photographs and the pastels. The photographs of the drawings are displayed at the Hammer, putting us at a remove of several steps from the initial encounter.

Adler’s process shuffles the established deck of artistic values. The sense of privilege once accorded to a portrait drawing can’t accrue to a celebrity snapshot, which is inherently mundane. By tearing up the drawings and the snaps, Adler acknowledges the dissipation of their power in media culture, but she also acknowledges the power of art by turning them into a singular photographic suite. Art is her trump card

The result is visually odd and conceptually poignant. The six pictures are like an old-fashioned film-strip. The actor, illuminated from the side, looks down, looks up, glances back, tilts his head to speak, covers his eyes (and a sheepish grin) with one hand and then squints, Vermeer-like, toward the unseen light source (a window?). The implication of a narrative emerges--call it a silent picture--and it reinforces yet another story.

Sequestered within these images is the narrative of their making. You can see right away that they’re glossy photographs, while the crosshatched pastel markings, generalized surface planes and simplified palette also immediately reveal that they’re pictures of drawings. The encounter between artist and sitter expands in time, becoming a subject. Thoughtful reflection replaces the photographic myth of a decisive moment when the shutter clicks. These photographs don’t pretend to be a transparent pipeline to movie-star essence; they announce their distance.

DiCaprio is casually dressed in an open dark shirt and a white T-shirt, while the bust-length compositions and his relaxed demeanor suggest an easygoing rapport with the artist. He’s up close and personal. But, like any portrait subject, he’s still inaccessible. The layers of experience are what distinguish these pictures from publicity stills or other camera images. That doesn’t make them more truthful, only more compelling. Making photographic portraits of drawings, Adler touches a deep nerve about the nature of identity in a world of mass media.

“Amy Adler Photographs Leonardo DiCaprio,” UCLA Hammer Museum, 10899 Wilshire Blvd., Westwood, (310) 443-7000, through April 28. Closed Monday.

Animal Portraits

With a Certain Glow

Tom Knechtel is a fabulist. His paintings and drawings call on exotic sources--Victorian illustration, tarot cards, medieval illuminations, Indian miniatures and daydreaming imagination--to tell open-ended tales. Animals may or may not talk in his pictures, but the natural world is irradiated with a supernatural glow.

Knechtel’s oil paintings are reminiscent of cartography, but these maps chart a highly personal mental terrain, rather than a physical one. In one sumptuous section of the largest canvas, “A Mare’s Nest,” a man’s head is wreathed with flora, into which a romping goat, a bug-eyed ostrich, a rose-colored crab and assorted insects have been woven. This lush glimpse of fantastic earthly paradise is itself ringed by a circle of darkly roiling human bodies, like a hellish vision from Dante. Knechtel’s halo signifies both saint and sinner, and it refuses to separate one from the other.

The show also includes 19 exceptional works on paper. Painted with black egg-based ink, the six drawings of individual animals (pig, goat, mouse, water buffalo, etc.) isolated within empty fields of paper seem almost Chinese. They turn common creatures into vivacious apparitions through a remarkable economy of the brush.

The most gorgeous drawings are the pastels, which are infused with the rich colors of India. A sapphire lizard scampers across a curry-yellow page. A deep-blue cow sleeps curled up in a mandarin orange afternoon sun. A crimson bull looks out from a sheet of soft sage green. Knechtel layers the dense pastel colors so that they seem to glow through one another, letting the indescribable power of color consecrate the animals.

“Tom Knechtel: New Work,” Grant Selwyn Fine Art, 341 N. Canon Dr., Beverly Hills, (310) 777-8993, through March 23. Closed Sunday and Monday.

Afghan Rugs With

a New Currency

Adaptable traditions of folk art meet the life-sustaining demands of the commercial marketplace in “Wanna Buy an Afghan War Rug?” Eleven carpets, most the size of small prayer rugs but one that’s 4-by-6 feet, are on view at Dirt Gallery. The gentle flora, playful fauna and religious iconography found in traditional Afghan weaving have been replaced with the cold hardware and brutal machinery of war.

The wool rugs were woven between 1979 and 1989 by women in refugee camps in Pakistan (and perhaps Iran) during the Russian invasion of Afghanistan. Rich, earthy colors, made from natural vegetable dyes, are arrayed in familiar ways. A wide border surrounds a contained field in the center. Images are flat, seen in silhouette and often edged in black. The patterns are symmetrical.

What’s distinctive is the subject matter. Kalashnikov rifles stand like sentinels, framing rows of tanks, helicopters and troop carriers. Fields of stylized hand grenades are bordered in bullets. Land mines are laid out in decorative rows. Like an X-ray, ammunition is glimpsed inside weaponry. The weapons seem almost cheerful, partly because of the cartoon-like simplifications and partly because expected patterns seem to have morphed. A floral blossom becomes a stylized explosion, a water pipe turns into a grenade.

The most startling rug is the largest. Beneath your feet, a parade of military might passes by, flanked by an honor guard of enormous rifles, as if it were May Day or Veteran’s Day. Traditional decorative and abstract patterns are woven into the hardware, which results in anomalies like checkerboard land mines and jaunty argyle helicopters. Paradise and purgatory get all mixed up.

These surprising rugs may have been made in anticipation of a Soviet market for wartime souvenirs--although, given the Russian defeat in Afghanistan, that market didn’t develop. Since then they’ve been turning up in the port warehouses of Hamburg, Germany. In light of recent events, they’ve taken on a new and unexpected currency.

Dirt Gallery, 7906 Santa Monica Blvd., West Hollywood, (323) 822-9359, through April 20. Closed Sunday through Wednesday.

Female Artists

Just Foolin’ Around

Girls just want to have fun, and in “Super/Sex” they do. At Post, guest curator Michael Gold has assembled paintings, sculptures, drawings, a video and photographs by 10 women. Indulging the male gaze, however, has nothing to do with their art.

Much of the work--including a pile of painted bodies by Nicole Eisenman, black-and-white photographs of fat nudes in spare landscapes by Laura Aguilar, and Nicoletta Munroe’s color views of Hollywood boudoirs--is familiar. Others, such as a short video of brief and sometimes salacious vignettes by the young artist Micol Hebron, are not. What they share is an erotic playfulness that is not so different from what one already encounters in the culture at large.

The most engaging work here is a small new diptych by Megan McManus, who was seen in a solo show at Post last fall. Looking down, she paints her own lap--which means a viewer is cast into an intimate position that coincides with the artist’s viewpoint. Her bare, freckled legs are backlighted, which casts her crotch into smooth, undifferentiated shadow. The mystery is heightened by the carefully observed banality of the context, where a beautifully painted linoleum floor and brilliant green towel frame the artist’s brightly painted toenails.

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Post, 1904 E. Seventh Pl., Los Angeles, (213) 622-8580, through March 9. Closed Sunday through Tuesday.