Charles Garabedian, “Die Todt Stadt,” 2009, acrylic on canvas, 96 x 66”.

Charles Garabedian, now in his late-80s, is still producing peak work, and even introducing new architectural elements and figurative styles to his post-Grecian archetypes. Vintage Garabedian – towering, gawky, male and female nudes looming in the foreground of landscapes - can be found in “Adam and Eve” and “Amazon Queens;” he melds gruesome with delicate in “Salome II;” and he goes Matisse-ish in “The Juggler.” Indeed, in “Die Todt Stadt,” a tall acrylic on canvas (most works are on paper) of an abstracted cityscape, a loose excerpt from Matisse’s “The Dance” appears in the windows of a narrow rectangular structure. There are sweeps of violence in the show too: Apollo gets an arrow to the chest in “Apollo and Daphne;” a woman caresses a severed head in “Salome II;” and in “Starless Night” a city burns on a hill in the distance as two soldiers indifferently while away the time in the foreground. Throughout, Garabedian maintains his well-honed sensibility for a figuration that is childlike but not innocent, quirky but not folk art. “Homage to Busby Berkeley,” a 14-foot-wide painting on paper, which incorporates looser figuration from the toolbox than is found in the other works, reminds us that his output, not unlike that of Matisse or even some of Picasso, is only deceptively simple (L.A. Louver Gallery, Venice).
Michael Shaw

Ian Everard is a Santa Cruz-based artist and illustrator whose intriguing exhibition investigates the relationship between the real and its image. Everard started out with the concept that he would acquire twelve copies of the book "Advanced Techniques of Hypnosis" and create an exact copy of the book each month. These copies were to be exhibited on tables in the gallery that resembled Everard's drawing table, each with a light and a magnifying glass. Finished or not, each drawing was sent to the gallery at the end of the month with a short note about the process or the fact that it was unfinished. Unfortunately Everard was only able to acquire 5 copies of the book, which was originally published in the 1940s and whose striking cover depicts three faces caught in a spiraling vortex. Complementing the installation of the twelve tables are drawings on vellum that juxtapose numerous book covers and the apparatus that Everard uses to magnify and draw them. It is clear than Everard is a skilled draftsman who can render at ease anything that he chooses to copy. What is of interest here is that he leaves many of the works incomplete, suggesting that what is absent has as much value as what is rendered. It is from those white spaces that the art emerges. It is less interesting to comment on Everard's talents than to wonder about his intentions and his choices of books to copy. There is also the fact that he insists on presenting the real and its double together. In addition to the static works, three animations are also on view encased in wall mounted black boxes. These fast paced works juxtapose image, drawing and sound that elucidates the process and the motivations embedded within the work (Sherry Frumkin Gallery, Santa Monica).
Jody Zellen

David Adey, “John Henry,” 2010, mixed media installation.

According to folklore, John Henry, a man of near-mythical strength and determination, made fifteen feet of railroad line to the steam drill’s nine. In the face of the machine’s purported ease and convenience, Henry made his stand with his bare hands. Inspired by Henry’s mythical dedication to human accomplishment, artist David Adey uses bridge-building principles to wedge several hundred books across a gallery room using thousands of pounds of pressure on the facing studs. The sculptural effect is monumental and anti-monumental at the same time – think of a giant-sized card catalog s < script src="/plugins/editors/tinymce/jscripts/tiny_mce/themes/advanced/langs/en.js" type="text/javascript"> uspended at eye level, but just the cards between two thin metal rails – no card catalog bureau. The books themselves make for an odd assortment of literature; crime fiction jostling up against “Fly Away Home,” but they were chosen for size and binding, nothing else. In fact, that is what makes the proposition interesting; the idea propelled the object making and there really is a “sense of human purpose” here (Luis De Jesus Gallery, Santa Monica).
Jeannie R. Lee

Carl G. Jung, from “The Red Book.”

© Foundation of the Works of C.G. Jung, with permission of the publisher, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.

Nearly 50 years after analytical psychiatrist Carl Jung’s death, his two hundred and five page, vividly illustrated “Red Book” (1914-1930), recently released from a locked Swiss safe deposit box, is entombed in a glass display case on public display. Only two pages at a time of the original text can be exposed to view. However, at a reading station nearby, four copies of its recently published facsimile are made available to those who would like to get their hands on simulations of the text in which Jung worked out his theories on individualism, archetypes and the collective unconscious. A Tibetan mandala collected by Jung joins a series of his own paintings and drawings that line the walls of the exhibition room. Typed drafts with handwritten corrections and two of Jung’s earlier, fantasy filled “Black Books” are also on display. A video mounted outside the gallery fills in the gaps. The show inspires a variety of related programs: discussions with artists, filmmakers and analysts, as well as an overnight sleep-in at the museum. Pleasant dreams everyone! (Hammer Museum, West Los Angeles).
Diane Calder

Peter Wegner

Peter Wegner's work has long been about systems and language and how the two work together to create meaning. He has an uncanny ability to create beauty as a byproduct of layering information, taking things apart and putting them back together with formal precision. For this show rather than assemble, Wegner cuts away so as to allow forms and their surfaces to be the embodiment of the work. In “Absence of Field” the structures emerge from a single surface, the large structures becoming part of the wall. The formal grace of the installation is exhilarating. In numerous works Wegner plays with illusion by actually painting different tonalities of white in the absent spaces of the lattice directly on the wall.  In works that incorporate language, form and content merge in a more direct way. The alphabetical commands of "Alpha to Zulu (with Pauses)" are painted in white letters, separated by dot-dot-dot on a blue structure. A black lattice that also has a series of dot-dot-dots on its surface is layered on top of the blue object. Reading through the layers becomes a back and forth between what is seen and what is referenced. While most of the new works on view are painted structures that investigate the sculptural presence of a flattened diagram or lattice, "Limits of Language I" is a large collage of found screen-printed texts. These letter forms are cut and reassembled to become a translucent abstraction that references language but cannot be read. Wegner likes to play with opposites, absences, and the visual forms of words. While the text in his works is often specific, the sum of the parts often results in a hole. Its these double entendre's that cause Wegner’s works to resonate beyond their formal qualities (William Griffin Gallery, Santa Monica).
JZ

Adam Pendleton, “Code Poem (portugal) #4,” 2010, glazed ceramic, three elements: 6” diameter circle, 6” square, 6 x 12” rectangle.

“EL  T D   K” features paintings, sculptures, glass-and-mirror photo silk-screens and text works on paper, all slick in their own ways but also highly engaging. The main room’s “code” paintings and sculptures harmoniously riff on language, and take the Morse code dot-dash sequence as their foundation. The squares that Adam Pendleton has added to the circle (dot) and rectangle (dash) aren’t noticeable unless you’re an aficionado of such outmoded communication systems, but they do contribute to making a luscious form of post-minimal ocular stimulation. Silk-screening vibrantly-colored paint onto flatly-primed canvas, the images pop (one especially, in a fluorescent yellow), but are also elegantly contextualized by the black ceramic cubes – also Morse code-based - that line the floor as if in mid-communication. One text print comes from Amiri Baraka’s poem “Black Dada Nihilisimus” from 1964, the other from a short story in “Best Gay Erotica” of 2007, and these works serve both to expand the range of the paintings, while also pushing language in general to a place of subtly-jaded meaninglessness (Roberts & Tilton, Culver City).
MS

Robert Lazzarini, “gun (I),” 2009, steel and walnut, 13 x 8 x 8”.

Bring a strong constitution and be prepared to sign a waiver before entering Robert Lazzarini’s “Guns, Knives, Brass Knuckles” (though, since I wasn’t required to sign one, I suspect the waivers were used only for the opening, when folks were packed in close proximity to sharp objects).  The “Guns” (Colt-45-ish handguns) are by far the most successful of the three iterations, the most malleable image/object to undergo Lazzarini’s trademark stretched-warp, in which he takes three-dimensional objects and both flattens them out and makes them appear fun-house mirror-elongated. In conjunction with the custom-designed walls that slant inward towards the floor, they provide a ground-level form of vertigo, while dazzling with their craft. VideoRoam has been re-continued in the gallery’s secondary space formerly occupied by Angstrom. As easy as it so often is to bypass gallery video projection offerings, Tobias Yves Zintel’s “Acid and Ice-cream” will reel you in given half a chance. Various subjects in three-quarter profiles spout poetic non-sequiturs in overdub that turn out to be lyrics from Joy Division, Slayer and the Sisters of Mercy, which are in turn inner-cut with plant and landscape close-ups as well as ice melting inside an ice-box, presented in stop-motion fashion. It’s a not-unfamiliar video deconstruction format, but executed to hypnotically riveting results (Honor Fraser, Culver City).
MS

Givan Francesco Rustici, “John the Baptist Preaching to a Pharisee and a Levite,” 1506-11, bronze.

Photo:  Mike Jensen.

Leonardo da Vinci and the Art of Sculpture examines the Renaissance master’s talents as a sculptor via proxy. Donatello’s “Bearded Prophet,” a work that influenced the young Leonardo and which had never before traveled outside Florence, opens the show. In a separate room, borrowed from the collection of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, preparatory drawings of Leonardo’s ambitious “Trivulzio Monument” convey the might-have-been power and majesty of his unrealized oversize bronze sculpture of Francesco Sforza on horseback. French soldiers who invaded Milan in 1499 destroyed Leonardo’s twenty-four foot tall clay model of the duke’s horse. Sixteen other drawings by Leonardo, and the unfinished painting, “Saint Jerome,” testify to the ability of the multitalented artist to create the illusion of three dimensions on paper or canvas, especially when dealing with the human figure. Recent studies suggest that a silver altar relief by Verrocchio, also featured in the exhibition, may include two figures by his apprentice, Leonardo. Also under deliberation is the master’s role in the work of his associate, Giovan Francesco Rustici, whose group of three bronze figures are centered on John the Baptist (The Getty Center, West Los Angeles).
DC

Pieter Hugo, “Omo Omeonu, Enugu, Nigeria,” 2008, color photograph.

Following his popular New York solo show, “The Hyena and Other Men,” in which large-format photographs capture street performers (and their children) with their muzzled hyenas during off-hours, Pieter Hugo takes theatricality a step further in his new body of work, “Nollywood.” Using actors from the flourishing Nigerian film industry, the result is the bone-chilling manifestation of a collective nightmare – a place where the real and unreal are often difficult to tease apart. The devil sits next to his demure and turbaned wife, and a dwarf confronts you in the jungle with a sword in hand. Using the many existing stock characters of popular Nollywood cinematic culture, Hugo goes far beyond standard documentary work. If you’ve forgotten the visceral belly-churning of experiencing something so different, so alarming, that you are startled into self-conscious awareness of your own perceived normalcy, let the bare-footed masked man (wearing only a trench coat, bowler hat, large fake ears, and carrying a hatchet) take you away. The traffic is blurred behind him, which makes you wonder if you’re the only one who can see him (Shoshana Wayne Gallery, Santa Monica).
JRL

Jeff Koegel, “”201. The Invention of Belief,” 2007-09, acrylic on raw canvas on panels, 60 x 72”.

The title of Jeff Koegel’s series “Carbon Rainbow” suggests two distinct and opposite emotional states of being – dark foreboding contrasted with great optimism. Carbon is a heavy, earthy and tangible physical substance; while a rainbow is a transparent illusion to life. Composed of acrylic paint on linen, the work is based on diverse aesthetic models - Byzantine icon paintings, aboriginal art, ikebana, and trompe l’oeil - different stories that feed into each other, react and contradict each other; thus, the art conveys a constant emotional shift that parallels our individual lives. Using a layered style of overlapping real and abstract shapes – birds, musical instruments, keys, animal bodies, electrical circuitry, and medical instruments – Koegel presents a contradiction of information that is not easily deciphered. Contradiction disarms the viewer who must negotiate its different symbols, compositions, and meanings. And when negative shapes are presented in a layered context, what looks real becomes something entirely different. The dark becomes light, and the light seems to take on an unsettling appearance (Merry Karnowsky Gallery, Miracle Mile).
Roberta Carasso

Nathan Redwood, “Feelers,” 2010, acrylic on canvas, 70 x 56”.

Nathan Redwood’s masterful, liquid painting style is fully in effect in “Altered Atmospheres.”  His spaghetti- and toothpaste-like bulbous striations delightfully pulse in fictional landscapes and interiors dotted with objects such as chairs, two-by-fours and recurring shovels. Despite the lusciously fluid brushwork and a sophisticated palette, the objects that dot Redwood’s worlds often come off as goofy, quaint and/or a bit antiquated; one wonders if the paintings might be better if the landscapes were object-less - as is already the case with “Feelers” and “Into White.”  As both works are from 2010, it’s possible that images with less figuration are on the horizon.  “Into White,” along with the “Reverse Option” and “Low Anthem,” feature erased or whited-out splotches of space, an effective pictorial device, and, one would think, more than enough to interact with the ropy, fluid bands that Redwood so convincingly owns.  The caveat to this theory, however, is that the objects – vessels, chairs, tables – serve to set off the more abstracted gestures by contrast, and without which their effect would be less pronounced and less effective. But, as the two-aforementioned forays would suggest, a more non-objective direction not only could flourish, but seems inevitable (Michael Kohn Gallery, West Hollywood).
MS

John Singleton Copley, “Watson ad the Shark,” 1778, oil on canvas, 71 3/4 x 90 1/2”.

Courtesy the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

Those who evaluate genre paintings by awarding points solely to the most convincingly realistic imagery will miss the point of “American Stories: Paintings of Everyday Life, 1765 – 1915,” a compilation of 75 narrative works dating from our pre-Revolutionary days until European modernism emerged in America as film became the medium of choice for storytelling. Take the time to analyze subject matter and compositional choices and to decipher whose everyday life is being represented in these stories told by both well known and rarely exhibited artists. You will be rewarded with a better understanding of how such imagery colors our views of America’s history. Gilbert Stuart’s “Anna Dorothea Foster and Charlotte Anna Dick,” pictures two young women, beautifully attired in white and pastel pink, sheltered from worldly political concerns, at home with their needlework. Stuart elevates the most marriageable of the pair by indicating that she has progressed beyond sampler-style skills: her work is displayed on a tambour frame. John Singleton Copely’s “Paul Revere” brilliantly represents the heroic craftsman, laboring over a teapot, as a thoughtful, moral participant in insurrection (Los Angeles County Museum of Art [LACMA], Miracle Mile).
DC

(left) Jeffrey Gibson, "Submerge," 2007, oil and spray paint on canvas, 84 x 120".

(right) Steve Hough, "Wake," 2009, color-shirting auto paint on carved plastic panel, 36 x 86".

Forget about categorizing Jeffrey Gibson’s paintings. There simply are too many elements to consider and influences to decipher. It’s best to look at each painting as an individual work even if there are certain unifying traits like his penchant for using iridescent hues—successfully. “Submerge” is a large canvas roughly divided into two spheres, one dark with barely discernible brushstrokes and shapes and the other composed of energetically applied swirls of paint. In “Singular” and “Shred,” Gibson employs unconventional silver and iridescent reddish pink hues to evoke the soul of cities in all their chaotic, gritty beauty. It’s an axiom that good art should never be static, that it should move viewers in a variety of ways to keep offering options for discovery. Steve Hough does exactly that with his Plexiglas panels shaped and covered with painstakingly applied, multitudinous layers of (mostly iridescent) car paint that has the appearance of water. If the beauty looks tranquil, it’s best to stay alert. Step aside, and the color and with it the atmosphere changes. Move back, and depth increases. Step up close and there is a sort of minimalist nothingness, a void of texture--just a gentle sea of color(s). He has take the boredom out of perfection (Arin Contemporary Art, Orange County).
Daniella Walsh

Bradford Salamon, “Jasmine,” 2010, oil on panel, 12 x 12”.

Bradford Salamon has evolved from a portrait artist working in an expressionist style to a more classical approach. Considering the brief period of this transition (since 2003) and the clear dexterity of his depictions of people and interiors, the progression is awe-inspiring. Now this work conveys both expressive passion and academic control. They demonstrate his admiration for and inspiration by masters as John Singer Sargent and Henri Matisse with a nod to Edward Hopper. “Simple Pleasures” features a contemporary, sportily dressed couple in repose, in a room inspired by Hopper, the handling, with its clear lines and details, reminiscent of Sargent. “Perizad” is a scantily costumed courtesan-like woman posed against an exotic background that is evocative of the Algerian odalisques favored by Matisse. “Daydreaming” is another beautiful, sultry woman, yet a more contemporary one, with green shift, transparent, patterned shawl, bare legs, seated on a heavily patterned couch, the latter again suggestive of Matisse’s patterns. Here the light in the window is also like Hopper’s. Several paintings of interiors such as “Antique Chair” and “Quiet Corner” are of finely wrought rooms, fit for the aristocracy of a century ago, again crafted classically. A whimsical departure is “Clare Small,“ a portrait of a charming five-year old child in a pink kitchen, derived from the model’s dollhouse kitchen. While the works are inspired by a variety of artists, the show’s underlying theme is classical beauty in technique and subject matter (Joanne Artman Gallery, Orange County).
Liz Goldner

The OsCene 2010 is a biennial-style survey of paintings, sculpture, photography and installations in a variety of styles, techniques and media by 50 California artists. For those familiar with the California Biennial at the Orange County Museum of Art, the OsCene might appear correspondingly tepid with its numerous scenes of Orange County domesticity. But there are also plenty of quietly experimental works that expose the often hidden, darker sides of Southern California life. “The Pack Rat” by Gina Genis is a glaring exposé of this contradiction. Photographed surreptitiously from the outside of a Leisure World (retirement community) apartment at night, it reveals a domestic setting, talked about but seldom seen. An elderly man sits at a table surrounded by floor to ceiling junk and garbage, including empty potato chip cans, a notice from the DMV, newspapers, cardboard boxes, old electronic equipment, albums, plastic bins and bottles and artificial flowers. More serene is Andrew Printer’s “Rob and Ted” depicting two men enjoying breakfast in a well-appointed kitchen, both stark naked. “Overland #7” by Fran Siegel is a hybrid painting/low relief sculpture of Los Angeles just above LAX. The colored pencil, ink and pigment on cut papers and wood used here represent more than elements of the work, but a conceptual comment on the random quality of this unplanned city. “Family Trees” by Suvan Geer is a luminous collage of old family photos that appear and disappear against the backdrop of a giant, ancient-looking tree, partially shrouded by transparent curtains with dried leaves scattered on the floor in front. The work is inspired by and commemorates the dead tree as much as the people who have passed on (Laguna Art Museum, Orange County).
LG

Ana Mercedes Hoyos, “Untitled,” metallic acrylic on canvas, 60 x 40”.

This is a two for one exhibition – the art of Ana Mercedes Hoyos and the unusual history of the Palenque people. Each is integral to the other and each needs to be seen as an ensemble. In Latin America, and particularly in her native Columbia, Hoyos is regarded as one of the leading living artists. Her prolific career spans four continents and five decades. Her work is standard in many museum collections in Colombia, Mexico, Spain, Japan and New York. Based on the selection presented here, what makes her art unique is her exquisite use of line and edge in clear and striking renderings of colorful fruits sold by Afro-Colombian market ladies. Her style is sensual, and her ability to draw, paint and sculpt is mesmerizing. However, in this exhibition Hoyos changes up from her usual subjects in order to introduce us to another world - The Free People of Palenque. These Colombian natives, dating back to the 17th century, have an unusual history and culture rare in South America or anywhere else for that matter. A matriarchal society to the present day, the Palenque people seized an unusual window of opportunity when the Spanish Crown not only granted freedom to a group of runaway slaves, but allowed them to chart their own government. Thus Palenque became the first free territory in the Americas. To convey the power of women, Hoyos focuses on linear renderings of aprons worn by the matriarchs as they conduct business in the marketplace with complete freedom and authority. The work is understated to the point where the tied bow that forms the central feature of each apron, drawn close up and with great attention, becomes a curvaceous abstraction in backgrounds of pink, blue, green, white, and gold. Hoyos shows that simplicity is elegant; and uses that effect to convey that freedom is the most natural order of human existence (Salt Fine Art, Orange County).
RC

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