Portraits With a Wicked Sense of Self

One glance at the titles of Janeita Eyre’s photographs--”Twins Modeling Identical Leech Gowns,” “The Day I Gave Birth to My Mother” or “Two Fakirs Waiting for an Audience”--reveals more than a little about this young Canadian photographer’s wickedly unsubtle sense of humor. Mixing up tropes that include Spiritualist tomfoolery, Pictorialist sentimentality and Surrealist grotesquerie, Eyre’s mock self-portraits reflect less upon the artist herself than upon the capacity of the photograph to distill its subjects into essences.

She’s done up as a punk priestess, a pre-Raphaelite Madonna, an Edwardian spinster, a Victorian porn icon or a dour duenna; with blond, red or black hair arranged in pigtails, a tight bun or sexy disarray; and perversely accessorized with faux Elizabethan collars, hangman’s hoods, checkerboard tights and sieve hats. Eyre occupies the center of elaborate set-pieces that make no sense at all--especially since she appears in each one twice, as herself and her evil twin, sultry doppelganger or body double.

Still, the images at Sherry Frumkin Gallery look fabulous, especially the color ones, in which Eyre’s obsessiveness shows itself off to good advantage. “From the Alphabet of Revelations” is a study in contrasts: red fingernails, red snoods and red slices of ripe tomato studding the wall, offset by blue gowns, a blue-tiled floor and a blue ceiling.

Black humor is clearly at the heart of these pictures (“Self-Portrait as Mrs. Charles Costello” commemorates the artist’s divorce, courtesy of a manicured finger stuck up a willing nostril). Yet, like Cindy Sherman’s photographs, Eyre’s tableaux are mostly about fashion--its terrors and dictates, but also the sheer playfulness it allows.

Whether this is an alibi for a specifically feminine brand of masochism or a critique of it has yet to be determined. I suspect, though, that Eyre is less concerned with making statements than with cultivating style-crimes.

* Sherry Frumkin Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 453-1850, through Aug. 16. Closed Sunday and Monday.

*

Warped Innocence: Not since Kim Dingle’s obstreperous, cantankerous and pleasantly perverse incarnations have babies as strange as Jacques Flechemuller’s been seen. Letting out a yawn so big it threatens to split open its owner’s pudgy pink cheeks, fixing on the viewer with the cold stare of a provincial official or looking down shyly from behind vintage ‘50s glasses, the toothless creatures at Jan Baum Gallery aren’t so much reflections of pure id as icons of innocence, necessarily warped from the get-go.

Needless to say, Flechemuller’s oil-on-canvas portraits are not the kind proud parents hang over their fireplaces. Taking the part of the slighted tots, the artist calls his show, “C’est La Faute de Mes Parents”--”It’s my parents’ fault.”

Blaming Mom and Pop for everything is an analytic cliche and by now a well-rehearsed joke. So are these images, despite the formidable flesh tones and generally luscious application of paint.

Do they need to be more? Legitimacy could always be conferred here by way of pedigree; these paintings conjure all manner of art historical precedents, in particular, Phillip Otto Runge’s unforgettable toddlers, literally bursting at the seams like symptoms of nature run amok.

Yet, like any good sight gag or more elaborate jeu d’esprit, Flechemuller’s art needs only to work on its own terms. It does, and this doesn’t make it superficial, just smart and guiltlessly unromantic.

* Jan Baum Gallery, 170 S. La Brea Ave., (213) 932-0170, through Aug. 23. Closed Sunday and Monday.

*

Scales of Landscape: In Byung-Hun Min’s black-and-white photographs at Jan Kesner Gallery, things seem out of balance. The sky looms large while the city below is a faint shadow, the ocean is a bubble of light along the horizon and the forest is a fine network of scratches at the edge of the frame.

Yet, saturated in the dispersed tones this young Korean artist favors--diluted so that only the middle range of grays is visible--things eventually fall into place so that even the most dramatic shift in scale registers merely as a trick of the light.

It is tempting to read these gelatin silver images as abstractions. The forms Min depicts--a body of water, an empty road, a flock of birds, a mountain ridge--can only be glimpsed at the bottom edge of the rectangular frames. Purged of all detail, they function as counterpoints to the vast expanses of bleached sky above, like trim running along the bottom of an otherwise sober garment.

But despite the fact that these images have to a large extent shed their referentiality, one suspects that Min’s concerns aren’t purely formal. Like Minor White, this artist is highly attuned to metaphor; this means, among other things, that he relies upon the capacity of things to represent themselves and other things, even when they seem to represent nothing at all.

* Jan Kesner Gallery, 164 N. La Brea Ave., (213) 938-6834, through Aug. 17. Closed Sunday and Monday.

*

Headless Nudes: At Merging One Gallery, Maurizio Bottarelli’s massive painted nudes are less the product of intense observation than the stuff of allegory. Loosely inspired by the late nude studies of Rodin, these headless apparitions are all breasts, bellies and thighs, silhouetted against vast fields of lush, blue pastel as if they were wafting through the sky or plunging into water.

This Bologna, Italy-based artist has been painting the female nude since 1963. The eight large mixed-media canvases on view, along with a selection of smaller works, suggest a single-mindedness that is both admirable and a bit dull. Repetition sets in quickly and is pretty much unrelenting.

Still, Bottarelli manages to hold our interest with certain surface effects. His technique involves laying paper down on canvas and then tearing it away in places or layering it with what looks to be sand and grit. The roughness he achieves, though not at all inelegant, mitigates against the preciousness of the imagery.

So do the streaks of yellow pigment that surround the figures. Like electric shocks, they militate against the somnolence that characterizes Bottarelli’s endeavor. Unfortunately, they aren’t quite enough to jolt these ponderous works alive.

* Merging One Gallery, 1547 6th St., Santa Monica, (310) 395-0033, through Aug. 20. Closed Sunday and Monday.