ART : ‘Man in Mirror’ Mystifying Exhibit

LAGUNA BEACH —  For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as I am known. --I Corinthians, 13:12

Elusive figures ghost-walk through the misty spaces of John Paul Jones’ paintings and prints from the late 1950s and early ‘60s. Other blurred figures appear in his recent sculpture. They are images of the viewer, reflected in dim outlines that strip away the personality and leave only a shadow of the self.

Phyllis Lutjeans of the UC Irvine Fine Arts Gallery had a hunch that both bodies of work were intimately connected, despite the decades that separate them and the different media Jones used to make them. So she guest-curated what she modestly calls a “side glance” at the work of this UCI faculty member for the Art Institute of Southern California, where it is on view through Feb. 20.

“Sideglance” is the title of one of Jones’ mirror pieces, and it aptly describes the way the sheet of stainless steel or aluminum set into a bass wood frame glancingly reflects the viewer’s image. Personal details are blurred; the eye registers only the moody bulk of a silhouette.

In other works, a sheet of copper yields a different kind of image: warm and glowing, with sharper focus. “Suncatcher I” perks up in light the way a starlet shines on camera: the gleaming copper beams back romantically softened reflections of everything it faces.

The frames of these simple-looking pieces are crafted with small, shy snatches of ornament: tiny slits between the strips of wood, miniature dowels, small groupings of nails or holes, painted triangular shapes. Most of these works have an utterly neutral, self-effacing quality, but a few have distinctive personalities. Perched atop “The Rose Queen’s Mirror,” a “crown” of black and copper triangles adds a special piquancy to the slender vertical swath of copper.

The luminosity of the mirror pieces seems directly connected to “Blonde,” the most striking image in the show. In this painting from 1960, the woman’s upper body is suffused in a yellow glow that rises to a crescendo in her astonishing cloud of hair, so intensely hued it almost creates a palpable vapor, like a scattering of pollen.

Suave handling of line and color gives a few other early images a vivid presence. The profiled woman in “Red Lady,” an etching and aquatint, exudes a sexy inquisitiveness that stems from the impudent curve in her neck, the unusual shape of her nose and her wide-eyed gaze. Is this a portrait of Jones’ former wife Chadlyn?

But most of the early figures are wispy, aloof creatures. In “Walking Woman,” an etching on zinc, an elongated, armless figure with a pronounced arch in her back strides through a vague environment with traces of scaffolding. A small, unbeautiful nude couple standing rigidly at attention are the Adam-and-Eve-like figures in “Walk in the Sun,” a charcoal drawing on clay-coated paper (the clay gives the sheet a yellowish cast). An intense corona of light in the darkness follows a mysterious tall figure with cascading hair and a long, trailing gown in “Night Lady,” a brushy lithograph.

“Ivory Lovers, French Lieutenants’ Woman” apparently based on the movie and book titled “The French Lieutentant’s Woman,” is a drawing of a lovers’ trysting scene. Faces are unreadable, however, and even the sex of each figure seems unclear, although both are half-dressed. Rather than show the viewer what the scene would have looked like to a voyeur, Jones seems to be taking us inside the act of passion, the feverishly intense moments when things are moving too fast for logic or thought.

Observers have noted Jones’ debt to the late 19th-Century Symbolists. In poet Jean Moreas’ Symbolist manifesto, he said the aim of the movement was “to clothe the idea in a sensitive form.” The painters transformed their subjects with stylistic distortions and wove them into mythological and religious themes. The dreamy female figures of Gustave Moreau and the blurry wax sculptures of Medardo Rosso seem particularly related to some of Jones’ images.

A private man in both his life and his art, Jones has tended to steer clear of contemporary artistic movements--his work was figurative at the height of the Minimalist movement and abstract in the heyday of figurative painting. Yet he is also, inevitably, a man of his time. The blurred, mystical look of his imagery from the ‘60s seems related to aspects of the hippie era, when many sought otherworldly perceptions through meditation or drugs.

Work from the mid-’70s shows Jones in the process of figuring out how to let go of the figure. Inchoate forms that look like zigzagging mountains and rushing water emerge from the brown-and-ivory blur of a drawing called “Ivory Winds.” This moody, indistinct look at the natural world gets a more definitive treatment in “Ming Wings,” with its scattering of gray ridges of paint scuffing up a big expanse of gray. That “damaged” quality--the ridges look like traces of an object ripped from the canvas--and the aura of emptiness and negation associated with the color gray give the painting its quiet power.

Exactly why Lutjeans calls the exhibit “The Mirror in the Man: The Constant Image,” remains somewhat unclear. She writes in her statement that the title “is significant . . . because it is this mirror in each of us that John Paul Jones’ work forces us to recognize.” What mirror in each of us? Perhaps she refers to our inability to perceive the psyches of other people except as tantalizing, dim outlines.

The elusiveness of Jones’ figures is such a paradoxical thing: Often they seem at once intimate and far away. And then again, that’s frequently the way we feel about people we know very well. There are always things about them that can’t be fathomed, can’t be possessed.

This exhibit inevitably brings to mind the Art Institute’s 1989 show of drawings and paintings by Jones’ late daughter Megan. Although stylistically very different, her essential approach to art was related to the delicacy and dreaminess of her father’s work. The tiny ceramic sculptures of women that Megan made in the months before she succumbed to cancer suddenly seemed to me to be a loving homage to the tiny bronze reliefs her father made a few years before she was born.

“The Man in the Mirror: The Constant Image” continues through Feb. 20 at the Art Institute of Southern California, 2222 Laguna Canyon Road, Laguna Beach. The gallery is open Mondays through Thursdays from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Fridays from 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., and Saturdays from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. Admission: free. Information: (714) 497-3309.