Deriving Beauty From Gorky’s Work

A small still life, which looks as though it were wrested from a fever dream, is one of the many wonders in a show of Arshile Gorky’s drawings of the 1930s and 1940s at Manny Silverman Gallery. All phallic protuberances and sharp, spiky leaves, it seems to follow the Freudian logic of condensation and displacement. But it is too refined, as if the dream had been stripped of excess in the service of clarity.

Gorky has always been something of an anomaly, not least because he was enamored of Surrealism though convinced that unrelenting spontaneity led to chaos. Historically, too, he was caught somewhere between that panoply of styles we call Abstract Expressionism and European Modernism, which he worked through with near-religious fervor.

Several of the drawings in the show date from the mid-1930s, when Gorky gave himself over to Cubism--specifically, Picasso’s depth-less space and colliding forms. These images are fascinating precisely because they are so unabashedly derivative.

Indeed, Gorky’s longtime New York dealer, Julien Levy, called him a “camouflage” man, noting that the artist had changed his name upon arrival from Armenia and was fond of lifting passages from Paul Eluard when penning love letters.

Gorky’s exquisitely nervous line--Surrealist-derived, but strange and singular--would soon emerge. The later drawings on view indicate the extent to which his line structures the imagery (those opulent, pliant shapes and bristling projections) rather than vice versa.

On at least one occasion, the forms seem to fade away entirely, as the eye is drawn to the movement of a heavy black crayon, which echoes the fine pencil tracery as if desperately restating a mysterious case. Yet, in another image of the same year (1946, two years before he took his own life), Gorky’s marks are positively insouciant: dotted here, feathered there, smooth and unruffled elsewhere.

All this makes for good drama. It also makes for astonishingly beautiful images.

* Manny Silverman Gallery, 619 N. Almont Drive, (310) 659-8256, through March 1. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Multilevel Process: A zeitgeist is a dangerous thing. If you’re not careful, you start to see it everywhere.

That’s the case with Helen Pashgian’s new paintings at Estelle Malka Gallery. With their thick, glassy surfaces (which mimic screens) and their geometric abstractions (which conjure complex computer graphics), these works seem to be emblematic of our current obsession with all things digital.

Only after reflection do other, more appropriate references come to mind. Their very translucence, for example, brings up the Light and Space movement, while their glossiness redefines 1960s Finish Fetish art.

Pashgian is indeed a veteran of that era’s attention to then-new Plasticine materials, with their seemingly magical ability to create sparkling and unblemished surfaces. She has been perfecting her techniques since then, working with specially formulated epoxy to develop the incredible depth that the largest piece in the show displays.

This painting, with its nods to the free-wheeling lines and dribbles of Abstract Expressionism, is actually the least satisfying of the works on view. The best restrict their imagery to pure geometric forms, while playing with their material’s transparent layers.

A blue-toned triptych, for example, features three transparent, semi-concave panels. These slope up and out from the wall, allowing the gallery’s light to shine through them, casting a shadow.

Pashgian has painted a graceful, sloping curve on the back surface of each panel, and the curves in turn are shadowed on the wall behind. This doubling and trebling creates six layered, curvilinear geometries--functions that speak less of engineering than of Platonic ideals and, not incompatibly, a humble reverence for handicraft.

* Estelle Malka Gallery, 8920 Melrose Ave., (310) 859-1016, through Feb. 13. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Bold ‘World’: It’s hard to resist a show entitled “Hester and Zorro: In Quest of a New World.” Lucky for us, Carole Caroompas does not disappoint.

Her new paintings at Mark Moore Gallery are trashy, flashy and never coy. Which is not to say that the screaming-Mimi-colored confabulations aren’t witty, but rather that they don’t take well to innuendo. That would imply too much restraint.

In every one of these hugely intemperate tableaux, Caroompas parades the anonymous visage, the intimate gesture, the extinct species, the bastardized type, the celebrated gesture and the cheesy sentiment. Meanwhile, witness at least a dozen style-crimes per each, as images nabbed from Frederick’s of Hollywood catalogs, 19th century medical illustrations, embroidery samplers, Egyptian hieroglyphics, tie-dye T-shirts, computer graphics, B movies and comic books explode all over one another, with tasteless frenzy.

All this as a means of getting at male hysteria, die-hard female coquetry and a host of other late 20th century maladies.

It isn’t difficult to see a relationship to Lari Pittman’s paintings here, especially in terms of the manic energy, lusty color and cavalcade of stylistic tics. Yet this work is less perfectly resolved and, for all its bravado, more tentative.

Caroompas is well aware that something is seriously wrong with a culture that overblows its every dysfunction, but she’s less confident about what attitude to assume while channel-surfing the absurdities. Many things entice you here, and this alone makes her work uncommonly sympathetic.

* Mark Moore Gallery, 2032-A Broadway, Santa Monica, (310) 453-3031, through Feb. 21. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Slinky Silver: John Swanger’s silver paintings at Kiyo Higashi Gallery would be garden-variety monochromes if it weren’t for the mysterious word “epiphyllum” inscribed upon their sparkling surfaces. The word sounds like a cross between “epiphany” and “phylum”--maybe a “surprising type” or a “typological surprise”?

In fact, epiphyllum is the name of a small genus of tropical American cacti, with flattened, jointed stems and showy tubular flowers. Yet since these paintings have absolutely nothing to do with the desert (except maybe metaphorically, as in the monochrome as a vast wasteland) or with showiness (except insofar as silver glitters), the word that distinguishes them is pretty much beside the point.

Perhaps “epiphyllum” is inscribed as a fancy excuse for a stripe, a nice vertical or horizontal, which can be doubled and/or reversed such that it becomes a pattern of lines, rather than a meaningful array of letters. There’s an alibi for you, although it isn’t very satisfying.

Swanger’s work is stylish without a doubt; slinky, even. But it’s ultimately empty and, worse yet, bereft of even the kind of provocation it wants to stir up.

* Kiyo Higashi Gallery, 8332 Melrose Ave., (213) 655-2482, through Feb. 22. Closed Sundays and Mondays.