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[2] 
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(1) Jorge Santos, "Private Rituals", acrylic and pencil
on board, 21 x 29". Photo: Bill McLemore Photography.
(2) Jorge Santos, "Another Plea for Excuses", acrylic and pencil
on board.
(3) Paton Miller "Ring That Bell", o/c, 50 x 65".
by Todd Baron
(Horwitch Newman Gallery, hosted by Koplin
Gallery, Santa Monica [Ed. note--Although a hosted exhibition, this
is not a part of the L.A. International series]) Realism can be at once
both disturbing and calming: Often the mere representation of what passes
for reality can seduce us into thinking we know the world we are viewing.
But Jorge Santos' work is a circus-nightmare turned upside down in its underlying
and quietly distressing nature. This realism is deceptively cool and sedate.
The characters who inhabit his world are calm and collected, distressfully
so as we witness the carefully rendered characters' odd detachment from
his or her surroundings and the moments they seem "caught" between.
These paintings freeze each moment in an overtly dream-like reality created
in a precisely realistic way. As with De Chirico and Balthus, it's both
those moments are rendered and what they eflect that is most distressing.
The surface of these acrylic and pencil works are like snapshots of characters
from a recognizably surrealistic world: A bemused clown; a little girl in
a birthday hat; a sleeping figure on a flight of stairs. As one delves deeper
into the carefully rendered images the agitation gathers. The clown struggles
with his straitjacket; the girl is about to blow out an unlit candle held
by a grey-suited man; and the sleeping figure is lying in front of a starkly
red spray painted target near a pair of detached costume wings. It's this
stark realism, the carefully penciled figures, that creates a surface calm,
while both the content and the composition are so unsettling.
In I Recognize Your Face the girl in the party hat stands in front
of a counter which partially conceals the grey-suited man. Behind him, at
an Escher-like angle in an open cardboard box, stands a grey-skinned nude
figure, bald and wearing a floppy straw hat, back turned towards the viewer.
The fact that the man holding the candle has one hand behind his back reeks
of so much dangerously hidden promise. His halfhearted grimace seems to
hide some real and more menacing emotion, like that of a child-molester
holding out candy to his prey.
Another Plea For Excuses features an apparently happy nude, again
greyskinned, and dressed only in top hat and a dangling black mask. A faucet
juts out of the floorboards of the otherwise equally bare room, attached
to a string held by the model. The persona and genderofthis and othernudes
in Santos' painting remains a mystery. Their headgear adds a theatrical
texture to these superficially serene but quietly anguished tableaux.
The subjects of Paton Miller's painterly fields are antithetical to Santos'.
They are thickly layered and read like palimpsests whose original imagery
lies buried. Most works feature a growling or struggling dog who seems to
either be protecting the human figures in the work or simply snarling at
them. Their ambiguity between the domesticated "man's best friend"
and attacking wild beast is suggestive of the duality between comfort and
fear that thematically runs through this work.
Robert Van Vranken's assemblagelike paintings build out from a central core
which contains a seemingly allegorical form. Surrounding imagery references
art historical or literary sources ranging from Flemish portraits to William
Carlos Williams.
