Los Feliz
Bedlam
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The Usual
Suspects has its artists posed in
mug shots in a frame on the desk at Bedlam, which opens off Shin, where the
chef is a real artiste and the prices are so modest you don’t know
which branch of the establishment you’re in when you’re there. Ali Blankley has
three large paintings (pink, orange, lime) with vague forms in the lower
right corner, ornamented with a black line figuration and a bit of calligraphy.
Pretty as millinery on first inspection, when you walk in the gallery, then
you step in closer and there’s a rabbit and a flower. Emmeric J.
Konrad takes two square plywood panels visibly screwed to wooden cradles and
paints (like a distant cousin of Grosz) a boxer on them, life-size, lying on
his back with his mouth bleeding and his eyes staring, quite a passionate
thing in its comical way (the grain of the wood is the visible background), the
title is Down. Josef Albers is
a continual preoccupation of Richard Godfrey’s. Here he applies
physical colors rather than light to his theme, in built-up three-dimensional
“homages to the rectangle” in various subtle nuances with a
sculptural feel (Pallet Series). Two of Lisa
Adams’ gag paintings are here, having come over from the beach to edify
the townsmen. “It’s not You, it’s the Viagra,” says a
hole in the ground (She knows, he doesn’t). L.A. is just
those two letters on two flowers made of white petals and lime sepals. Lucky 3 is not content to apply a super-realist collage
technique to neon signs and bathing beauties, it wants the truth of things
(the artist is Richard Kessler). Nathan Rohlander’s
Shoes is quite admirable, legs and heels on a bed, with the paint applied
forcefully as filler in patches, so that you stand back and it curves into
space deceptively. Michael Salerno’s
Black Fields has built up enough calligraphy to consume enough canvas
to catch the light and disperse it across its imbricating surface most
ingeniously. Abstractions by Richard
Edson (Photograph, blue luminous forms in blackness) and Lilli Muller
(red serpentines on white, large-scale, Entangled in Passion) pretty
much tell the tale. |
