ART REVIEWS : ‘The Fire Paintings’ . . . Burnt Offerings

“Yves Klein: The Fire Paintings� brings together 13 rarely seen works the French Nouveaux Realiste made between 1961-62 by waving a flame-thrower over sheets of prepared cardboard. His small- to moderate-sized abstractions--occasionally interrupted by ghostly imprints of women’s bodies--alternate between being stunning and silly.

Created with a violent, potentially destructive tool, some of Klein’s mythical images are breathtaking evocations of otherworldly energy. Others are uninspiring accidents made up of carbonized stains and half-hidden--but no less literal--silhouettes of nude women. They range from the gorgeous to the banal.

Along with a selection of Judy Fiskin’s tiny photographs from 1973-92, Klein’s installation inaugurates the Museum of Contemporary Art’s “Focus Series.� This program has been designed to partially compensate for the museum’s currently closed Temporary Contemporary branch. It promises to offer insights into the work of well-known, but insufficiently acknowledged, artists.

This installment of the series locates Klein precisely between the tail end of a romantic version of French existentialism and the emergence of a brashly American, performance-oriented Pop art.

Splashes of evaporated water, encrustations of baked pigment, delicate budlike burns, fading halos, nearly intangible ashes, densely smoky billows and liquid-looking shadows are present in his diverse, uneven body of work. Klein’s capacity for inconsistency suggests that he was equally driven by the desire to form beautiful images as he was dedicated to the performance of quasi-alchemical rituals.

For the Frenchman, whose artistic career ended after only seven years when he suddenly died in 1962, nothing divided his performances from their results. Fire perfectly fused his impulse to make visible the evidence of pure spirituality.

Today, more than 30 years after he attempted to marry Christian myth, pagan ritual, earth-bound sensuality and abstract beauty, his “Fire Paintings� look like curious attempts to resolve the contradictions between Modernist painting and Postmodern performance.

From formalist abstraction, Klein preserves the desire for purity, transcendence and ravishing visual beauty. From the more theatrical, less idealistic art, he appropriates a fascination for metaphor, reference and duration. It is as if his “Fire Paintings� come somewhere between a fading European seriousness and the playful irreverence of Allan Kaprow’s and Claes Oldenburg’s early work. These Pop artists put a spin on Modernism’s materialism by relating art to consumerist culture.

Without this powerful emphasis on banality and superficiality, Klein’s “Fire Paintings� nevertheless escape the heavy-handedness of much spiritually inspired abstract painting. Mysteriously compelling, his images hover in the strange space between a diminished European artistic tradition and a soon-to-be dominant American Pop culture.

The Museum of Contemporary Art, 250 S . Grand Ave., (213) 621-2766, through Dec . 6 . Closed Mondays.

Strange Bedfellows: Meaning multiplies and significance proliferates in “Bedroom Pictures.� Curated by New York-based critic, Terry R. Myers, this provocative grouping of eight painters at Asher/Faure Gallery is often sexy, sometimes stiff, but always giving. Installed with extreme deliberation somewhat at odds with its impulse toward wild promiscuity, it is a vitally puzzling show whose whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

To his credit, Myers plays fast and loose with the notion of “bedroom pictures.� In his catalogue essay, he traces this idea back to Nicholas Wilder’s description of John McLaughlin’s austere, sensual abstractions. As the story goes, McLaughlin’s paintings consistently found their way into the most intimate chambers of their owners. In Myers’ hands, “bedroom pictures� include any style that any passionate collector cannot bear to hang very far from his bed.

The idea is that bedrooms are different things to different people. All that they have in common is the absolute nature of the affairs that take place within them. As charged spaces where public and private lives intersect, bedrooms serve as the model for what Myers finds compelling in contemporary painting. His exhibition flaunts the fact that this art, too, is a ground where pleasure, decoration and refuge cross paths with fear, pretense and dread.

His show consists of the unlikeliest of bedfellows. Three resolute abstractionists--Linda Daniels, Mary Heilmann and David Reed--share the space with the raucous, accessible Pop of Llyn Foulkes, Roy Lichtenstein and John Wesley. Larry Johnson’s brightly colored photo-texts and Carl Ostendarp’s Pop abstraction mediate between these extremes.

Together, the works invite interpretations based on the unreliability of second-hand knowledge, the instability of categories and the fluidity of meaning. “Bedroom Pictures� begins with a look of shocking inconsistency, but unfolds over time to reveal a fecund territory that gives back as much as anyone puts into it.

Asher/Faure Gallery, 612 N. Almont Drive, (310) 271-3665, through Dec. 12 . Closed Sundays and Mondays.