Finding Conceptual Pleasures in Monochromes

It’s hard to pinpoint the cause of the immediate allure of Morgan Fisher’s monochrome paintings at China Art Objects Gallery, except perhaps to say that they seem instantly like puzzles solved. Lots of monochrome paintings start out seeming like inscrutable puzzles, but these work backward to that point. If technology indeed demands the most elegant solution to a specific problem, then Fisher is a technological whiz.

The show includes two types of paintings. Five works from a series titled “The Italian Paintings” date from 1999. Two “Self-Portraits,” one from 1994 and the other brand new, demonstrate nearly imperceptible changes in the artist.

That’s because the self-portraits are also monochrome paintings--specifically, white rectangles painted directly on the gallery floor, one at the front door and the other at the door to the back room. (Both are thus scuffed up with footprints, abnegating the purity associated with abstract white paintings.) Using his height and weight, Fisher calculated the surface area of his body’s skin in square inches. The length of each rectangle corresponds to his height--6 feet 41/2 inches--while the width is determined by dividing his height into the surface area. A 4-pound weight difference between 1994 and 2002 results in a visually undetectable difference in the width of the two monochromes.

Clearly, these are not paintings that mean to record an expressive self, even though the pure abstractions are also representational in a rather intimate way. Scuff marks from trampling feet even lend an odd poignancy to these painted bodies, which sprawl across the floor as if the gallery were a Modernist crime scene.

Each rectangle is literally a figure on the ground. The eradication of conventional figure-ground relationships--an apple on a table, a tree in a field, a mark of colored paint on a blank canvas--has been a consistent goal of painting for nearly a century. Fisher’s objectify the aim.

“The Italian Paintings” push it further. Each is a plywood panel 20 inches high and 2 feet wide, and each is painted a medium gray. The alkyd enamel is applied without any visible brushstrokes, creating a seamless skin; the color, midway between black and white, aims for a nonreferential nothingness. The paintings glancingly recall Gerhard Richter’s work, which also oscillates between abstraction and representation, often in shades of gray.

Rectilinear shapes have been cut into the panels, usually at the corners. A gallery handout explains that the cuts’ dimensions derive from old travel-book guides to Italy, and the paintings’ titles include that reference. You don’t need the information, though, to sense what’s up.

About an inch deep, each panel emphasizes its presence as a physical object affixed to the wall. The cutouts likewise assume a paradoxical material heft. Are they the shaped figures seen against the gray ground of the panels?

Or are the panels themselves shaped figures seen against the white ground of the gallery wall? Has the figure-ground conundrum been heightened? Or erased? Why do these carefully crafted, monochrome, nonrepresentational, medium-gray paintings seem virtually impossible to have made without the ubiquity of photography as a modern mode of perception? Fisher’s rigorous, compelling exhibition is full of visually grounded conceptual pleasures, while launching the new gallery season at a very high level.

China Art Objects Gallery, 933 Chun King Road, Chinatown, (213) 613-0384, through Feb. 1. Closed Sunday through Tuesday.

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Mimicking the Masters, and Other Foolishness

There’s a corniness to the paintings of Norwegian artist Odd Nerdrum that has always been off-putting and cozily endearing. He plainly wants to rival “the art of the museums” (as Paul Cezanne put it), but more through mimicry of technical method than conceptual reinvention--and, he wants it in an age when museum art no longer means the booty of fallen European empires. His work, epic sagas of mythic scope rendered with self-consciously Old Master-like technique, also seems unafraid to court a certain hearty and self-deprecating foolishness that comes with that grandiose territory.

At Forum Gallery, 16 paintings and one lithograph range in subject matter from modestly scaled self-portraits to big pictures of puzzling narrative conundrums. Figures are often life-size. The self-portraits, which pointedly summon up Albrecht Durer and Rembrandt, can make you wince--not because they’re badly painted (they’re quite deft) but because the powerful precedents blow them out of the water.

Nerdrum, 56, is often called a Classical Realist, but his imagery is also imaginary. (Not surprisingly, his first international attention came in the 1980s, during the heyday of Neo-Expressionist painting.) The costume dramas feature warriors, peasants, nudes, prophets, innocent youths and grizzled elders. His figures occupy desolate landscapes or stark interiors, painted in gray-brown glazes, while the meager warmth of red-orange under-painting flickers against golden brocades and ruddy leather.

The figures are also almost always engaged in static pantomime. A wistful young warrior pokes at the reclining torso of a sleeping, nude hermaphrodite, whose weightless body floats on the picture’s surface like a decal. Three identical female nudes, alluding to the three graces of classical antiquity, squat and defecate in a barren field. Figurative repetition--a grid of seated lasses, a row of erupting volcanoes, a chorus line of singers--applies a contrived Minimalist overlay of geometric pictorial rhythm.

The strongest picture here is “Transmission” (2000), mostly because it pictures the frustrated activity of pantomime on which Nerdrum’s oeuvre relies. A pot-bellied elder wearing a fairy-king’s crown and a silly grin gesticulates at a young boy seated before him. The boy’s hands and arms flail, his eyes closed, a deathly skull at his side.

Lessons are being learned here, though not necessarily those the teacher means to convey.

Forum Gallery, 8069 Beverly Blvd., Los Angeles, (323) 655-1550, through Feb. 23. Closed Sunday and Monday.

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‘Self-Medicated’ Is Anything but Sedate

“Clock 7 Minutes 2 Seconds” (2001) is a sculpture by Tom Sachs of a homemade hourglass, which he cobbled together from two vodka bottles taped end-to-end at their pouring spouts. The bottom bottle is filled with sand. The time identified in the title may refer to how long it takes for the sand to pass through this jerry-built clock--or perhaps how long it takes to guzzle a bottle of vodka (and become inescapably incoherent).

Either way, altered states of consciousness through time materialize as an artistic aim. And because Sachs has chosen to employ bottles of premium Russian vodka, the work obliquely sets current social realities against yearnings for spiritual transcendence familiar to Russian art--avant-garde, folk and religious.

The savvy sculpture is included in a wryly engaging group show at Michael Kohn Gallery titled “Self-Medicated,” which takes a witty swipe at common presumptions about the ostensible healing powers of art. Bruce Conner’s delicate 1962 pencil drawing, “Mushroom,” show’s a worm’s-eye view of its mottled, potentially psychedelic (or poisonous) subject, while Fred Tomaselli’s abstract “Field” of actual marijuana leaves encased in transparent resin offers another route to nirvana (or prison).

John Baldessari’s “Tincture of ‘A Person Who Wants Everything’” (1996) is a medicine bottle that purports to hold what the title says, while a pharmacist’s label informs us that ingesting the fluid promises (or threatens) to transform you into someone else. Edward Ruscha’s pale pink disk of Pepto-Bismol on an acrid field of smoggy brown color pledges a cure for unnamed cultural nausea.

Damien Hirst, the British artist who has made pharmaceuticals something of a specialty in his bratty work, is here with several screen prints that depict enlarged medicine labels from his own fictional line--steak and kidney tablets, corned beef pills--along with a sculpture composed of a hospital dispenser for syringes and hypodermic needles.

Andy Warhol’s blunt 1979 charcoal contour drawing, “After the Party,” records a tabletop strewn with the empty residue of cocktail glasses and wine bottles left in the wake of tipsy guests’ departure; the Pop drawing cleverly reverses the trajectory common to most still-life images, which typically offer us a vision of abundance--or at least the promise of some meager sustenance.

Michael Kohn Gallery, 8071 Beverly Blvd., (323) 658-8088, through Feb. 23. Closed Sunday and Monday.

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A Floor Show of Designer Ingots

At Ace Gallery, New York artist Carl Andre recapitulates the standard Minimalist motifs he formulated in the mid-1960s. He acts more as a producer of sculpture than a maker, forsaking such traditional sculptural procedures as carving, casting or affixing together, in favor of lining up identical, commercially made industrial units in geometric arrangements on the floor. The sculptures forsake verticality, too, emphasizing instead the horizontal expanse on which a spectator walks.

Here, the units are aluminum ingots--chunky, not-quite equilateral wedges of visually inert matter with rough, scumbled surfaces. (The ingots’ silver-gray color recalls tooth fillings.)

Thirty or more ingots are arranged in straight lines that bisect galleries lengthwise or crosswise, or else follow the corner between a wall and the floor. Lines are made from side-by-side pairs of ingots, making long troughs or little saw-tooth “mountains” like the letter M.

The repetition that characterizes Andre’s work has acquired an unexpected veneer over the decades--namely, a signature look. This shabby-chic show is surprisingly tasteful, even elegant.

What was once a startling, radical subversion of entrenched sculptural practice has become, 35 years on, an established designer product.

Ace Gallery, 5541 Wilshire Blvd., (323) 935-4411, through April 15. Closed Sunday and Monday.