Beauty conjured out of ruin

Scenes from liberated Iraq have been making the front page for more than a year now. We’ve seen violence, desecration, desolation and even the occasional image of celebration. Surrounded by text and anchored by captions, photographs in the news have fed the national and international debate about the legitimacy of the invasion.

In a stirring, perversely gorgeous show at Gallery Luisotti, Simon Norfolk presents nine of his own “Scenes From a Liberated Iraq.” The photographs, made in April 2003, are not breaking news, but they remain insistently relevant to the debate. By nature of the medium, they’re specific to their subject, yet they also raise broad questions about military action in general -- destruction in the name of protection. Large, chromatically lush and liberated themselves from the prescribed context of newsprint, the images read less as reports than as provocative ruminations.

Norfolk, born in Lagos, Nigeria, and based in London, has photographed at sites of cataclysm around the world -- war zones, refugee camps, areas of racial, religious and political conflict. Though his work often appears in news publications, such as the New York Times Magazine, he identifies himself as a landscape photographer rather than a photojournalist.

Norfolk’s pictures attest to his acute understanding of how political and social strife manifest themselves in the physical landscape. In 1998 he published a powerful book of photographs from different sites of genocide, a study of place as repository or vehicle for memory.

In the work at Luisotti, Norfolk has composed scenes that feel preternaturally still and silent. Shooting often in soft afternoon light, in sites mostly devoid of human presence, Norfolk sets the stage for regarding the work at a slow, considered pace. One picture presents a view through dense foliage to a piece of military equipment nestled within. A title sheet informs us that it’s a surface-to-surface missile system, hidden in an orange grove north of Baghdad. The vehicle would be hard to identify without help. It looks simply like something alien and out of place on this Edenic patch.

In another image of poignant dissonance, a grove of tall, stately date palms fills three-quarters of the print. In the patchy grass at the bottom lies a scattering of artillery casings, strewn about like fallen fruit. Norfolk’s chosen subjects compel him to be a Realist, but he’s keenly attuned to the presence of the surreal within the real.

The only image in this group to include a living Iraqi shows a little boy standing in the rubble of the former air force headquarters in Baghdad. Three tall columns stand askew, and chunks of concrete lie in tumbled heaps around him like a Lego nightmare. He stands with his hands on his hips, an uncannily mature expression on his face suggesting, “So, it’s come to this.” On the cluttered ground, a giant copper arm from a toppled statue of Saddam Hussein reaches toward him as if in greeting, or perhaps like the host of a show presenting the next act, the next generation.

Norfolk’s photographs are tight amalgams of several traditions in art -- romanticized ruins, documents of social distress and the creation of large photographic prints that are impressive spectacles in themselves. Nature wreaks its own kinds of havoc (those in Florida need no reminder), but is also the victim of and witness to human displays of force. By conjuring beauty even when recording devastation, Norfolk asserts not just that war is hell, but hell in our given heaven.

Gallery Luisotti, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 453-0043, through Nov. 6. Closed Sunday and Monday.

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She’s probably hiding something

Susan Hauptman rarely cracks a smile in the self-portrait drawings she’s been making for two decades. She wears a no-nonsense hairstyle -- a buzz cut, more or less -- and she stares straight out at us from under heavy eyelids that seem to dim her real interest in what’s beyond.

Nevertheless, she’s something of a trickster. The New York-based artist’s recent charcoal and pastel drawings at Forum Gallery show her cracking subtle visual jokes and tweaking expectation, all the while maintaining an expression flat as a mug shot.

Illusion is her primary vehicle and plaything. She manipulates it with extraordinary dexterity, intensifying it and subverting it with equal panache. In the large-scale self-portraits, she draws herself with near-photographic exactitude. The black netting of a hat she wears in one of the images looks so three-dimensional crinkling over her forehead that even peering at the drawing close-up and from an angle doesn’t dispel the magic.

In most of the images, Hauptman plants a foil of some sort, with inconsistent success. A colored beach ball appears in a few of the otherwise black-and-white drawings, incongruously buoyant and bright. The selective injection of color gives the drawings a curious awkwardness, like an old movie that’s been colorized.

Visual puns come off better, especially in an image in which a boyish Hauptman sits at a table, the two thick stems in a vase before her reading as suspenders crossing her white shirt. She also plays deftly with forms shifting out of palpability, dissolving into charcoal gray fog. In a group of still lifes, some forms obey gravity and others defy it.

There is always something in Hauptman’s drawings that catches you off-guard -- the quirky thrift-shop ensembles she wears, the juxtaposition of her mannish face and hair with outfits of ruffles and lace, the squirrel resting on her palm. Hauptman jump-starts each narrative with the power of illusion and then devilishly throws it off-course.

Forum Gallery, 8069 Beverly Blvd., (323) 655-1550, through Nov. 13. Closed Sunday and Monday.

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Peculiar, rich and passionate

In the palm of a raised hand lies a tiny, naked child with moth wings and feathery antennae. His chest is splayed open to reveal the scarlet-tinged machinery of the organs within. In another of Tino Rodriguez’s tightly rendered, wildly imagined tableaux at Jan Baum Gallery, three androgynous fairies with flowers in their long dark hair squeeze juice from a giant pomegranate. And in another, a conch shell spills flowers onto a young man resting on grass, each blossom articulated like a precious gem.

Ripe, overripe, florid, exotic, erotic, bizarre -- Rodriguez’s work is irresistible in its theatrical excess. He paints small, some images barely larger than a playing card, fitting snugly in old daguerreotype cases. Others are slightly larger, but most measure well under 1 foot per side.

In spite of its size, the work is broad in its embrace of diverse sources and as dense as Persian miniatures and manuscript illumination. The rendering is crisp and precise, in jewel-like gold and blood red.

Rodriguez, born in Guadalajara and living for many years in San Francisco, borrows from Frida Kahlo, Catholic iconography, Hindu mythology and more, swirling them all together in a vibrant syncretic potion. The syncretic impulse applies to his take on identity as well.

Most of the figures (many based on self-portraits) have feminine and masculine attributes and a hybrid nature, flesh merging with wings and serpent tails. Bodies are ornamented with flowers and adorned with tattoos, but these bouts of personal display are countered by images of masquerade and concealment. Rodriguez’s work can get quite dark and sexually explicit, but this is a PG-13 selection, peculiar and rich, oozing with passion.

Jan Baum Gallery, 170 S. La Brea Ave., (323) 932-0170, through Oct. 23. Closed Sunday and Monday.

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An intimate, intense bond

“He Said, She Said” is an absorbing show centered on the relationship between artist Manuel Neri and his primary model, poet Mary Julia Klimenko. That relationship, spanning several decades as well as several marriages, has a depth and complexity that this selection of work alludes to but can’t possibly chronicle in a comprehensive way. The show, at Bobbie Greenfield Gallery, is a satisfying teaser -- piquant, concentrated, full of promise for greater extrapolation.

A 1991 portfolio of Neri etchings and Klimenko poems opens the show with a jolt of intimacy and intensity. Neri’s images of the poet’s face, in profile and head-on, are sparing of features but texturally assertive. Some have torn contours; one features the artist’s tender handprints on each side of his model’s head.

A wash of pomegranate red defines the skin in one of the prints, punctuated by inky, fingerprint eyes. The imagery feels like an ongoing tussle between articulation and abbreviation, emotional temperature and physical detail.

Klimenko (then Mary Julia) wrote her poems in the forms of letters, seven in the voice of Frida Kahlo writing to Diego Rivera, and one in Rivera’s voice addressed to Frida. They overflow with vexed desire. Klimenko’s words read like the fingering of a knot of longing, pain, unity, ambition and submission -- much like the one that tied her to Neri, according to her introduction to the portfolio.

The show includes two sculptures by Neri, head and gesture studies on paper, torn figure drawings, and another artist’s book, “Crossings” (2002), combining poems, photographs of Klimenko and a hand-painted photograph by Neri. Urgency and tenderness course through it all, the words and the images and the collaboration they represent.

Bobbie Greenfield Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 264-0640, through Nov. 13. Closed Sunday and Monday.