A terrible beauty

Expression in art -- especially the psychic directness of unmediated feeling associated with flurries of gestural brushstrokes in abstract painting -- is a cultural cliche that’s, well, dead as a doornail. But Julie Mehretu makes it live again. A young painter having her L.A. debut in a traveling exhibition that arrived last week at the Gallery at REDCAT, she does it in a distinctive and meaningful manner.

Mehretu, 33, was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and raised in Michigan; now she’s based in New York. A breathtaking suite of four monumental paintings -- the largest almost 9 by 20 feet -- is accompanied by seven smaller canvases, all made in 2002-03. Although abstract and absent topical subject matter, they clearly speak of experience in a world shaken to its foundations by the events of Sept. 11, 2001.

Mehretu’s are the first paintings I know to approach that explosive territory with fierce determination and without sentimentality. Her paintings address big themes of history, calamity, germination and spiritual interdependence. And she explores them in ways that go beyond the merely personal.

These pictures don’t describe the World Trade Center, even though architectural fragments appear, and they don’t record their destruction, even though one painting includes the unmistakable silhouette of an airplane fuselage and wing. They do add context, clarity and even hopefulness to the mix.

The four abstract murals tell a loose narrative. “Renegade Delirium” is explosive. “Dispersion” scatters its pictorial seed far and wide. “Transcending: The New International” locates the minutiae of human experience within a macrocosm of spatial infinity. “Looking back to a bright new future” affirms that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Take “Renegade Delirium,” which might be subtitled “Apocalypse, Again.” From the bottom, your eye rises on a pair of escalators drawn in black ink, pushed along by a blast of shrapnel marks from behind. You arrive at what appears to be a classical amphitheater. From there, space expands laterally across the 12-foot-wide canvas. Architectural renderings of schematic stairways, corridors and colonnades merge with abstract French curves, clouds of smoky gray, scattered geometric shapes and fire.

Oddly, the palette is heavy on pastels -- pink, light blues, pale gold -- enlivened here and there with fractured shapes in hunter green and crimson. Its playfulness is shot through with inky black blobs, spurting lines and patterned bursts. Her marks never take the form of personal handwriting, though, even at their most gestural. Instead, Mehretu carefully and deliberately draws with an ink- or acrylic-loaded brush; drawing emphasizes the cerebral rather than the emotive.

This is one key to her distinctive reinvention of Expressionism. Like Jasper Johns’ paintings of targets, maps and numbers, her hard-edge gestures split the difference between surface as pure painting and surface as recognizable emblem. The result does not evoke the artist’s inner subjectivity; instead, it expresses a reality produced by collective understanding.

These paintings are about all of us, not merely her.

She also employs a simple device that, over the past decade, has become familiar in paintings by Toba Khedoori, Ingrid Calame and others. Mehretu pulls a diaphanous veil over her drawn marks and painted shapes. Sections of her paintings are covered with a coating of clear acrylic; then she paints again on top of that. She works in layers.

A remarkable optical sense of limitless void emerges, without recourse to traditional methods of illusionism. Virtual space seems to envelop a viewer. You feel as if you’re floating over the action -- just beyond the edge, in a privileged space of witness that is never entirely separate from depicted events. Imagine the vantage point of the Hubble telescope, shuttling through deep space while watching galaxies explode and collapse. Imagine TV.

Mehretu adapts diverse stylistic precedents. They range from brittle, metallic Russian Constructivism of the 1910s and ‘20s to epochal Chinese landscape paintings of the 10th century, which set the eye on a lilting voyage through time. The arc of Wassily Kandinsky’s career, from the gestural early Expressionist paintings to the crisp abstractions later, collapses in on itself. Jackson Pollock’s incandescent skeins of dripped paint merge with Leonardo da Vinci’s apocalyptic drawings of the deluge.

Roaming far and wide through sources is appropriate for an artist of Mehretu’s background, who works in today’s appropriation-minded world of global art. Yet the sharp recollection of Renaissance humanism is perhaps these paintings’ most surprising feature.

Leonardo is regularly admired for scientific curiosity and the invention of all kinds of modern machines. Ours has been, after all, an age of science and industry, and we effortlessly connect with this aspect of his creative imagination. But I can’t recall when his paintings and drawings have been so powerfully mined for contemporary aesthetic pertinence as they are here.

Take Leonardo’s first Florentine masterpiece, the unfinished “Adoration of the Magi.” The 8-foot-square panel never got beyond highly sophisticated under-drawing. Its elaborate perspective incorporates flights of steps, vaulted arcades and ruined arches, which form an armature for the barely contained energy of rearing horses and other mysterious forces.

In one of several ink studies for the panel, the architecture’s orthogonal lines dissolve into the swirling forms of royal retinues arriving at Jesus’ manger to witness the miracle of promised salvation. This drawing is famous for exposing the limits of Renaissance one-point perspective, as the upper reaches at the side of the sheet bend into extreme distortion. Intimations of the painting and the drawing reverberate throughout Mehretu’s show.

Or consider Leonardo’s unusual fondness for the trapezoid. The shape simply sliced the top off a triangle. But it subtly replaced the stability of a figural composition based on the triangle (or pyramid) with an amorphous sense of floating dynamism. A trapezoid is flat, but it also contains the illusion of a square tipping back in space. Leonardo used the compositional device to powerful psychological effect in joining figures of the Virgin Mary and her mother, St. Anne; visually they merge together, as if representing different stages of life and shifting states of mind within a single person.

Hovering in the center of “Looking back to a bright new future,” the culmination of Mehretu’s apocalyptic mural cycle, is a small, pure-white trapezoid. It’s surrounded by an exuberant burst of puddle-shaped color-forms woven into a rich, vaporous web of blueprint-like architectural drawing. The white shape, serene yet unsteady, floats in an eternity that simultaneously constructs and deconstructs around it. It is like something out of a post-Russian-revolutionary “Proun” painting by El Lissitzky, filtered through “Star Trek” and Stanley Kubrick.

Notably, perpetual warfare is the subject of Leonardo’s most famous trapezoid composition. The lost fresco “Battle of Anghiari” is known today from studies and surviving copies by other artists, including Rubens. Its clash of titans slyly mimicked the competition between Leonardo and Michelangelo, who was busy with his own battle mural on an opposite wall of the same government chamber in Florence. But Leonardo’s fierce central figures of sword-wielding warriors on horseback seem locked in an eternal conflict that transcends topical events.

Mehretu was among the few truly bright lights in the recent Whitney Biennial, a survey that was heavy on paintings of only fair to middling quality. REDCAT’s seven smaller studies, which she calls “excerpts,” sometimes slip into graphic illustration; her ambitious work clearly benefits from dramatic, encompassing scale. But the smaller ones do demonstrate the thorough, considered inventiveness of her approach.

It’s especially heartening to see a young artist grapple with contemporary social reality without any sense of grandiosity. These pictures of struggle are informed by a knowledge that the only constant in civilization is the continuity of epic change.

Leonardo, writing late in life about his endless fascination with the awesome power of water, inquired, “But in what terms am I to describe the abominable and awful evils against which no human resource avails?” He was talking about the strange dichotomy of the fluid, which can be touched but not grasped, and that is the source of life and an agent of annihilation.

He ended up describing it in tumultuous drawings of the deluge, which suggest Noah and the perpetual labor of starting over from scratch. They embody a terrible beauty, where Mehretu’s new paintings also find millennial relevance.

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‘Julie Mehretu: Drawing Into Painting’

Where: The Gallery at REDCAT, 631 W. 2nd St., L.A.

When: Tuesdays-Sundays, noon-6 p.m.

Ends: Aug. 8

Price: Free

Contact: (213) 237-2800