Hendler Paintings Mesmerize With Intense Hues

Maxwell Hendler is the king of color. His monochrome paintings are not correctly described as abstract, because their solid fields of intense hue are not disassociated from the specific instance of the unique color that is embodied. They refer to nothing but themselves. The paintings might be more correctly described as realist, although they’re also devoid of the illusions of the visible world that tend to cling to that term.

Confused? Good. That’s a sign of just how visually complex and intellectually challenging Hendler’s seemingly simple paintings are. The gorgeous colors quickly seduce, but the painterly conundrums promise lengthy relationships. At Patricia Faure Gallery, 14 recent panels make up a mesmerizing exhibition.

Hendler suspends pigment in a resin medium, which he applies in layers to a Masonite panel. The resin gets sanded and buffed to a high sheen. Each dazzling panel is saturated with its specific colored light.

All of the works are horizontal, which erases any associations between the art and the human figure. (The only person present is you--the active perceiver.) The smallest work here is “Siam,” a white panel just over 10 by 13 inches; the largest is “Fata Morgana,” a transparent gray-brown panel 4 feet high and nearly 6 feet wide.

In between “Siam” and “Fata Morgana” is an array of panels in a variety of sizes and jewel-like colors, for which names most often do not exist. “Film Bleu” is a limpid Prussian blue, though deeper and more intense. Raspberry ice, electric tangerine, toxic lime--by making up a name, your mind struggles to wrap itself around the color that floods your eye. (An anomalous work is navy blue--but it’s uniqueness is redeemed by being perhaps the only navy-blue monochrome painting ever made.)

Monochrome painting comes with lots of theoretical baggage. Much of it is visionary or spiritually inclined, thanks to the mysterious, oriental, feminine and pathological associations historically applied to color. Despite the wry acknowledgment of that history made by titles like “Siam” and “Fata Morgana,” Hendler’s monochromes banish all that. His paintings are secular in the extreme.

The almost severe intensity of these panels also eradicates the other common assertion about monochromes--namely, that color is superficial, cosmetic and inessential. Embodying color so forcefully and fully, Hendler voids that claim.

What’s left is sensuality, where the surface of the painting becomes the meeting ground for anxiety and pleasure. Hendler’s art recalls the 1960s, the last time an enthusiasm for color in art ran high. But he restores the rectangle of easel painting to the mix, which art in the 1960s necessarily abandoned. Easel painting couldn’t escape associations with representational art before the rupture of the 1960s, but it can now. The realism of Hendler’s monochromes is not representational.

When I was looking at the show, a couple stuck their heads in the door, glanced around, murmured, “No pictures here,” and left. They were dead right in their instant observation. They also made a big mistake in leaving so fast.

Patricia Faure Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 449-1479, through June 22. Closed Sunday and Monday.

Wit, Insight Characterize

Sculptural Ensemble

Like Atlas condemned to hold the sky upon his shoulders for all eternity, the concrete-gray sculpture of a black man in “Soul Power” kneels on one leg, the better to support the massive architectural vault that looms above him. Pentti Monkkonen, in his second solo show at Acme, has produced an astounding sculptural ensemble of pathos, insight and wit.

Eleven feet tall, “Soul Power” is classically divided into three sections. At the bottom is a Baroque pedestal, its ornate cartouches inscribed with the sculpture’s title, the artist’s name and the date. In the middle is the kneeling man, dressed only in baggy shorts (his boxers peek through at the back) and with dreadlocks hanging in front of his lowered face

Above this human “column”--and steadied by the figure’s upraised arms--is the lavishly decorated architectural fragment. The base of a vault, its blossoming shape recalls a vase or urn. The sculpture was cast in pieces from a durable material that includes plastic and aluminum, strengthened by a steel armature, and it’s meant for an outdoor garden. The big urn, which would fill with rainwater, drains through the kneeling figure’s eyes. In a shower, “Soul Power” becomes a weeping fountain.

Monkkonen has adorned the shelf around the vault’s base with assorted attributes. Some, like the mace and heraldic standard, are traditional symbols of valor and might. Others, like the bong and skateboard, are more playful.

They’re more contemporary too. An old European culture built on the suffering back of slave labor is sharply evoked, while the present reality is more equivocal--a historical burden merged with individual power and grace. Monkkonen wryly bills himself as “the hardest-working man in the art business.” Tongue out of cheek, his monumental sculpture is a nuanced tour de force.

Acme, 6150 Wilshire Blvd., L.A., (323) 857-5864, through July 6. Closed Sunday and Monday.

An Artist Harmonizing

Conflicting Forces

Laszlo Moholy-Nagy is the most famous Hungarian artist of the 20th century, and with good reason: His inventiveness in abstract film, photography, graphic design and constructed sculpture was matched by his broad influence as a Bauhaus master. However, as eloquently demonstrated by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s recent show about the Central European avant-garde, Moholy-Nagy wasn’t the only notable Hungarian artist.

Janos Mattis Teutsch (1884-1960), who was included in the LACMA show, is now the centerpiece of an ambitious, engaging exhibition at Louis Stern Fine Arts, which comes with an impressive catalog. In 41 works dated 1910 to 1925, Mattis Teutsch emerges as a gifted colorist who conceived of art as an energetic platform on which to harmonize conflicting forces.

“Composition VI” (1924), the show’s most commanding painting, marshals short, blunt strokes of chrome yellow, crimson, thalo green and orange to create a dynamic arrangement that merges organic and machine shapes. Lovely smaller paintings on board likewise evince an acute color sense, which probably derives from folk traditions.

Mattis Teutsch first trained as a sculptor. But the small, figurative examples in carved wood here, which retain an older Art Nouveau elegance, are among his weaker works.

The show also offers some helpful context, with 33 works on paper by 13 additional artists. Most notable are aerial photographs of rustic subjects (including cracked earth and rope) by Judit Karasz, a Cubist charcoal still life by Lajos Vajda and Cubo-Futurist scenes of peasant life by Bela Kadar.

Finally, an ethereal drawing with collage by Moholy-Nagy masterfully exploits the sheet of paper as an abstract field. Forms seem to shift between positive and negative, right before your eyes.

Louis Stern Fine Arts, 9002 Melrose Ave., West Hollywood, (310) 276-0147, through July 20. Closed Sunday and Monday.

Setting Reinforces Theme

of Urban Anomie

As with his engaging Project Gallery installation last summer at the UCLA Hammer Museum, San Francisco-based artist Chris Johanson has used the main room at Roberts & Tilton Gallery as a place to create an environment in which to hang paintings. Their subjects tend toward urban anomie, which is reinforced by the fabricated environment.

Here the room’s a maze, built from high walls made from corrugated paper painted to resemble concrete blocks. If you feel a bit like a rat maneuvering in a modern version of a medieval enclave, you also see people in Johanson’s brightly colored, folk-style paintings on board who seem numb, anxious or disoriented. Occasionally he throws in an abstract picture that suggests a flower drawn with a spirograph--or perhaps it’s a stylized explosion, or a dreadful maelstrom.

A man on his knees being pelted with water balloons; rows of heads in profile, each tagged with a psychological diagnosis; a group of people beneath a gigantic thought-balloon that morphs into a thunder cloud--life in the Big City is harsh. Nowhere does Johanson capture the experience better (or more succinctly) than in a small painting on paper in the very center of the maze; showing a black blob with human feet, it’s labeled “horrible vortex.”

Roberts & Tilton Gallery, 6150 Wilshire Blvd., (323) 549-0223, through July 6. Closed Sunday and Monday.