Horrors hidden in globs of paint
Jeni Spota paints like a cake decorator, spreading, swirling and daubing gobs of viscous oils with spatulas and applicators to create undulating fields of creamy color and supersaturated deliciousness. You find yourself with your nose very close to the luxurious surfaces of her nine small paintings at *sister before you notice that their writhing piles of paint describe horrors of biblical proportions.
That’s when you realize that this Chicago-based painter tells tales like a lunatic visionary, mixing well-known stories with outlandish fantasies to concoct perverse dramas that can be neither believed (because they’re flat-out preposterous) nor dismissed (because they contain too many grains of truth).
Spota’s paintings cover 12-by-14-inch panels. Nearly all feature crucifixions, often of a Christ figure and sometimes of several rows of anonymous victims, their naked bodies hanging from long crossbeams. Other martyrs are burned alive over fiery woodpiles or cooked in caldrons of boiling oil.
“Giotto’s Dream, Holy Mountain (Symmetrical version)” depicts Christ in duplicate, his bent legs, sagging torso and hanging head appearing to the left and right of the cross’s upright. In “Giotto’s Dream, Holy Mountain (Nightmare version),” the crucifixion takes place on an inverted mountain or in a hellish pit. Christ appears in the center, surrounded by more than 60 doppelgangers crowded around him as if reveling in Walpurgis Night ecstasy.
Choirs of angels and legions of nuns look on. In other images, cottages are festooned with cryptic banners as villagers prepare for kinky festivities. Think Hieronymus Bosch meets Pieter Bruegel, with a good dose of Jess Collins and Alfred Jensen tossed in to make the mix even more dizzying.
Spota’s inspiration goes back to Giotto, by way of Boccaccio, by way of Pasolini. She looks to a movie (Pasolini’s “Decameron”) based on a collection of stories that features a painter whose subject was the troubled relationship between humanity and divinity. It’s enough to make your head spin. And that’s just what her paintings do, making you wonder where the storytelling stops and reality begins.
The results are volatile. And intoxicating. This 25-year-old painter’s solo debut transforms what should be a sickly sweet stew -- or overdose of distastefulness -- into a fascinating phantasmagorial extravaganza.
*sister, 437 Gin Ling Way, L.A., (213) 628-7000, through Nov. 17. Closed Sundays through Tuesdays. www.sisterla.com.
Taking viewers out on a limb
Linda Stark’s new works are a little less Pop -- and a little more folk -- than anything she has made since she started exhibiting in 1990. The change makes sense for the L.A. artist’s craft-inspired, labor-intensive work. Even better, it takes viewers out on a limb, where all ambitious contemporary art gets us in spite of our better judgment.
At Angles Gallery, “Potion Paintings and Drawings” consists of eight exquisite diptychs. Each pairs a 9-inch-square canvas with a page-size sheet of paper.
The canvases are abstract icons. Each is covered with Stark’s trademark: diagonally interwoven rivulets of oil paint that she pours -- neatly, methodically, patiently -- to make variously translucent veils of color. Stark sometimes turns the canvas as the paint runs across it, causing the stream to change direction. This creates a knobby, bellybutton-style protrusion in the center of the panel.
That’s not all that interrupts the smooth surfaces of her works. Embedded in the paint are flowers, herbs and seeds, crystals, gems, trinkets, leaves, feathers and spices, not to mention bugs, roots and seashells.
These ingredients have the presence of ancient organisms trapped and preserved in resin. Stark has arranged them to complement the visual spin set up by her pinwheel compositions, suggesting abstract whirlpools or stylized tornadoes.
The drawings consist of precise maps of the paintings, with keys that identify and locate -- in elegant, razor-sharp script and gracefully curved lines -- the 13 to 15 ingredients in each piece. Under the title “Passion Potion,” Stark has listed its elements: Tibetan quartz crystal, red rose, patchouli, myrtle, Madagascar ruby, chile pod, bloodroot, two cloves entwined, four-leaf clover, dragon’s blood resin, three red flowers, quartz crystal and nine drops of seduction oil.
“Egyptian Love Spell” is the most exotic, its mix of red, yellow and blue paint flowing over a sphinx moth, a scarab, some myrrh and 10 other things. Along with an emerald, a mint bloom and chunk of peridot, “Leprechaun Gold Formula” includes several souvenir gold nuggets to match its green and gold palette.
Stark’s painted and drawn diptychs take image-and-text Conceptualism away from its roots in strict rationality and toward more permissive poetry -- a realm shot through with belief, hope and yearning along with the desire for life-changing transformations. That has been art’s province for a lot longer than Stark has been making it, and it’s just the remedy for troubled times.
Angles Gallery, 2230 Main St., Santa Monica, (310) 396-5019, through Nov. 24. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.anglesgallery.com.
Ordinary folks in odd situations
Three years ago, Thomas Whittaker Kidd exhibited 13 oils on canvas that invited viewers to get lost in the gooey details of paint while never losing sight of the wide -- and weird -- world in which we live. To look at those odd pictures of ordinary folks in recognizable settings was to experience imaginative whiplash: a sensation both thrilling and unsettling.
In five new paintings at the Carl Berg Gallery, Kidd eliminates the extremes and holds everything together a bit too tightly. Rather than taking viewers into the visible world of tumultuous social space, his meaty, sofa-scale paintings return us to an interior world that has the consistency and familiarity of recurring dreams.
Inexplicable things still happen in Kidd’s juicy pictures, and they’re worth pondering. In “Trust Cannon,” two guys in swim trunks perform an acrobatic trick with a makeshift antenna in a rushing stream. “The Insistence of Nature” shows a man clutching a tree branch as he sits in a bed that floats over a waterfall. And “Excitement Treatment in Orange” features a nude couple, asleep or unconscious in a rugged landscape. Two men in gray outfits tend to the supine man: One shines a huge heat lamp on him as the other dumps a bucket of Tang-tinted liquid over his head -- to no apparent effect.
The stories suggested by Kidd’s new works lack the wondrous discord of his earlier ones, replacing their strange, generous equanimity with a sense of disconnect. Calm is still there, but it is no longer uncanny. It does not convey self-possessed serenity as much as it suggests habits that have been fallen into, not because they are comfortable but to avoid risk and pain.
The people in Kidd’s pictures seem to be sleepwalking through life, merely going through the motions or on autopilot. The paintings look too much like offshoots of John Currin and Jim Shaw, although without the hysteria of the former and the Everyman wackiness of the latter.
Carl Berg Gallery, 6018 Wilshire Blvd., L.A., (323) 931-6060, through Nov. 10. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.carlberggallery.com.
Links between paintings, photos
A long time ago, a lot of photographers made their works look like paintings so viewers would take them more seriously. Lately, a lot of painters have been making works that take photography very seriously -- for all kinds of reasons.
Some of these artists are inspired by photography’s accessibility and quickness. Others find curious parallels between the art of painting and traditional, chemically developed prints, especially since those are being replaced by digital images.
Becca Mann is a young L.A. painter whose interest in the relationship between photography and painting is unresolved. Her six new works at Roberts & Tilton revisit the 19th century, just after photography had become popular.
The subjects of Mann’s paintings could not be more rooted in the past: a Civil War soldier, a horse, a buggy, a sailing ship, a pile of peat, a clapboard house. The way Mann paints could not be more contemporary: Swift monochrome washes occupy the same spaces as super-realistic renderings; patterned abstractions appear alongside dutiful realism; and illustrative sketchiness complements illusionistic tactility.
Her works’ dimensions are similarly disparate. Three canvases are big, at least 5 feet on a side. Three panels are tiny, not more than a foot in any direction.
Mann’s technical facility steals the show. How she paints is far more captivating than what she paints.
Part of the problem is that her 19th century pictures come off as preciously nostalgic. Her most resonant works are not stuck in the past. With their more ambiguous sources, they are mysterious and engaging.
“Untitled (house)” gives Edward Hopper and Arthur Hitchcock a run for their money. “Saphire County” ripples with menace, the confrontation between woodsman and businessman loaded with explosive energy.
In such images, Mann shows herself to be an artist worth watching -- now and in the future.
Roberts & Tilton, 6150 Wilshire Blvd., L.A., (323) 549-0223, through Nov. 10. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.robertsandtilton.com.