Cold Feat

Name a great city and chances are at least one art movement came to life here. Moscow: constructionivism. New York abstract expressionism. Los Angeles...the refrigerator still-life school.

Go to the corner of Western Avenue and Pico Boulevard and walk east a couple hundred feet. There, on the outside wall of a used-appliance store, you’ll see it, or them, actually. A pair of hefty refrigerators, carefully rendered by a sign painter, who not only captures the bigness of the appliance, the aspect that caused it to become a lineman’s nickname, but also the detailed interior smallness of it, the aspect that causes people to want to reach in and grab something cold.

Hong Lee, the Korean immigrant painter responsible, understands something that I’d never noticed even after decades of opening and closing refrigerator doors. Inside, each shelf holds a potential still-life painting. It would seem the world of major appliances has found its Cezanne.