Getting at the Partial Truth of What We See

The new work by Raul Cordero at Iturralde Gallery reminds us with canny humor of something we already know--that we cannot trust images, even photographs, to deliver the truth.

Partial truth is the best we’re going to get. It’s going to masquerade as the real, authoritative thing, and most of the time that’s how we’ll passively accept it.

The everyday construction of meaning through the manipulation of images usually merits a darker warning than Cordero issues here. After all, political power is at stake, public opinion is at risk. The histories of countries, empires even, owe much to the basic tenets that Cordero exposes, having to do with how very malleable meaning can be. They are propaganda’s tools in trade.

Cordero, though, makes us laugh, and reminds us further that, in this case, the playful and the dire aren’t opposites but simply two points on a single continuum. In “The Zooming Experience,” one of three groups of work on view, Cordero illustrates the concept that closing in on a subject doesn’t necessarily clarify it.

It might even obliterate it, as happens in a short video, which starts with an establishing shot of three eggs resting in a row. The camera zooms in on one of the eggs and keeps zooming in until the white of the shell fills the entire screen. All sense of the subject is lost. A sequence using fragments of a single painted landscape, and a lever-operated “Zoom Machine” demonstrate a related effect.

With tongue in cheek, Cordero works like a teacher, employing a variety of materials to explain a single lesson. In “Stages,” he uses Polaroids, lenticular images, paintings, writing, mirrors and souvenir statuettes to “construct” the Eiffel Tower. In a montage of Polaroids--shot not of the real tower, but of a 19th century photograph of it--Cordero builds the landmark methodically, image by image. In a multi-panel painting, the tower rises, stage by stage, from one panel to the next; mounted beneath the paintings, Polaroids (famous for their own ability to make images emerge from blankness) show the construction in reverse order, as dissolution.

In the third body of work, “Shopworn,” Cordero presents what appears to be physical evidence of an urban legend recounted in one of Dave Hickey’s writings about Las Vegas. In the center of the gallery stands a dress form in black cocktail dress with Hickey’s text beneath it on a brass plaque--the brass coyly reinforcing the story’s presumed authenticity.

The tale tells of a dress bought for a prostitute and sold by her the next morning, after which it was bought by another john and sold again, and so on some 500 times. In addition to showing us a dress--the actual dress, we assume--Cordero surrounds it with photographs of women (prostitutes, we infer) wearing it as they smoke, apply makeup and lean out of a car.

Do any of these elements document the story of the dress? Probably not. Do they give persuasive evidence that the story is true and not just a myth? Definitely not.

What is certain is that Cordero is both clever and technically agile, able to exploit the familiar idioms of any number of visual genres. His entertaining lessons can easily be applied to other circumstances in which image manipulation carries more daunting consequences. (Cordero is from Cuba, so political interpretations cling to his work, whether desired or not.) The show leaves us with the obvious revelation that all images are propositions, to be accepted or rejected. We accept Cordero’s for the lies they tell and the truths they teach.

Iturralde Gallery, 116 S. La Brea Ave., L.A., (323) 937-4267, through July 3. Closed Sunday and Monday.

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Aldo Salvadori and His Women

Modigliani, Matisse and Degas all make appearances in Aldo Salvadori’s lovely show at Double Vision Gallery--not in their own right but as influences assimilated into Salvadori’s gentle Modernism.

Although his name is unfamiliar in the U.S., Salvadori, 97, has enjoyed a long and fruitful career in his native Italy. He began exhibiting drawings at the Venice Biennale in 1930 and continued showing there into the 1950s, and throughout Italy up to the present. In addition to painting and drawing, Salvadori has made prints illustrating volumes by Mallarme, Rimbaud and Petrarch. The Double Vision show includes prints, oils and pastels, all depicting women--seated, reclining, nude and clothed, all absorbed in quiet contemplation.

Modigliani comes through in the eyes, in their upward tilt and in the frequent elongation of the face, its features abbreviated to shorthand dashes. That reduction to essentials also brings to mind Matisse, especially in the 1967 oil painting “Little Nude.” The woman, reclining with hands joined above her head, has a sketchy immediacy, and her slightly arching form reads as one of several stripes of color in the patchwork composition.

The flattened space that Degas borrowed from Japanese woodblock prints makes its way into a few of Salvadori’s works as well, especially in the pastel, “Nude at a Writing Table” (circa 1983), in which an expanse of empty space rises behind the figure and elegantly frames her.

One fine still life here hints of Salvadori’s broader range. Its slightly skewed perspective--coffeepot seen from the side, plate of fruit seen from above--animates the otherwise hushed scene painted in all the nuanced colors of dust. Comparisons to Giorgio Morandi spring to mind (the two artists were longtime friends), but as with the other artists whose impact is felt here, Salvadori stays recognizably apart, emboldened perhaps by their influence but not subsumed by it. He has a grace all his own that leaves a pleasant first impression.

Double Vision Gallery, 5820 Wilshire Blvd., L.A. (323) 936-1553, through June 22. Closed Sunday and Monday.

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A Visual Poet of the Outer and Inner Worlds

Another artist once called photographer Jose Figueroa a “hunter of images.” No, he says on the DVD playing along with his show at Couturier Gallery, that’s not me. I’m a “searcher of essences.”

True enough. Figueroa shoots not with aggressive territoriality or the aim to possess, but with tenderness and generosity, driven by the desire to explore his internal as much as his external world. One of Cuba’s most prominent photographers, Figueroa, 55, has worked as a photojournalist, but mostly as a visual poet, framing rich, suggestive details of the quotidian world.

In the mid-1960s, he served as a studio assistant to Alberto Korda, whose portrait of Che Guevara has become a universal icon of heroic fortitude. In one of the series here, Figueroa chronicles the various guises in which “The Image” appears--on a limited-edition cigarette lighter, a rapper’s T-shirt, the face of a watch, billboards, handbills, posters, burned onto a piece of wood and sold alongside crosses and prayer beads outside a Havana cathedral.

Another series tracks the sights and personalities of a single lively, slightly dilapidated street in Havana. Figueroa homes in on details to characterize the whole. An old gas station sign, its advertising nameplate missing, rises like a challenge against the stark sky, an abandoned hoop waiting to be filled. A boy, sitting on a slab of pavement, plays quietly by himself, the smooth curve of his naked back stretched and straightened to maturity in his shadow. An old Buick parked on the street decays like overripe fruit, its peel warping and loosening.

The subjects Figueroa photographs are rarely remarkable, but they are consistently poignant, particularly in their embodiment of time’s passage.

“State of Mind,” the third series excerpted here, is the most diaristic of the three. Figueroa describes the images as self-portraits, although he hasn’t aimed his camera at himself.

Each of the six pictures represents a window in a city he visited over the last 20 years. One taken at the Berlin Wall in 1990, before it had completely come down, shows a window filled with bricks and covered with iron bars. In Angola, where Figueroa worked as a war correspondent in the early 1980s, he photographed a building whose windows seem moot, the walls are so pocked with holes and the ceiling seemingly missing altogether.

The most recent image from this series shows a window with its shade drawn, shutting out the brightness of the day. Knowing it was made in New York on Sept. 11 gives its dark interiority great resonance.

The “State of Mind” series illustrates most explicitly what is implicit throughout. For Figueroa, looking out is just another way of looking in.

Couturier Gallery, 166 N. La Brea Ave., L.A., (323) 933-5557, through July 6. Closed Sunday and Monday.

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Color and Motion Consort in Oils

The 1960s “finish fetish” look, slick and pristine, has its adherents still, decades after surfboard surfaces and gleaming automotive paint jobs first showed up on the walls of Southern California galleries. Its countercurrent, though, runs even stronger.

A fetish for the unfinished, the raw and intentionally unrefined, traces its roots to the gestural immediacy of Abstract Expressionism, if not further. Arron Sturgeon, a young L.A. painter showing at William Turner Gallery, lands soundly in the latter camp.

Sturgeon paints in oil and wax, although “paint” is a catchall verb for the scraping, rubbing, dragging and abrading he does to forge surfaces that look like foundations for something to come--or remnants of something that was. Most of the paintings are 2 or 3 feet square, with a drab base color like that of an aged plaster wall.

With the zeal of an excavator, Sturgeon reveals passages where motion and colors like mauve, rust, sunflower, indigo and grape consort to wide-ranging effect. Often he drags a thick swath of paint across the canvas, its colors mixing as they go. The striated path loops and bends, sometimes stuttering in the manner of Gerhard Richter’s lush contrivances.

Scabby spots neighbor more luminous stretches, where Sturgeon has capitalized on the translucency of wax. He musters a huge tactile range in this work and occasionally the canvases get muddy. Generally, Sturgeon pulls back just before the integrity of the texture dissolves, and it’s this balance between control and abandon that invigorates the work.

Circles, rectangles and lines painted in solid colors temper the chaos. They don’t impose order, but suggest the possibility of its coexistence with the spontaneity that otherwise prevails. Hard edges and soft fluid space find their place in these works, which offer more gratification from close-up than from a distanced, all-over view.

Painterly surrender certainly wins out over geometric order. But Sturgeon seems to relish a certain hybrid quality, exemplified by the title, if not the surface, of one of his best paintings here: “Joy Science.”

William Turner Gallery, 77 Market St., Venice, (310) 392-8399, through June 30. Closed Sunday.