aaron GM @ ltd

ARTLURKER

A MIAMI BASED CONTEMPORARY ART NEWSLETTER / BLOG

 

Jet Set Saturdays: aaron GM at ltd

By Annie Wharton

Close-up capezio index. Image courtesy of the artist and ltd.

If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. – Emily Dickinson

In a perfect world, everything would be white and blue and we would speak with native fluency a previously unlearned language. The blue would be Royal Blue, like the paint slathered on Yves Klein models just before they writhe around his canvases; the white a bright white like Miami cocaine or the fluorescent lights of a Berlin kunsthalle; and describing the faultless simplicity of this Santorini-esque environ, words that previously we either feared to utter or never knew existed would miraculously find their intelligible forms in our throats and mouths. At ltd with his exhibition entitled capezio, aaron GM (née Aaron Garber-Maikovska) has created a perfect world.

A plethora of wheat flour and performance-based methodology in the exhibit immediately bring to mind Vito Acconci’s 1970 Flour/Breath Piece film, where the artist was shown attempting to blow a thin layer of flour off his own nude body. capezio’s lo-fi videos find GM reiterating the vernacular of 60’s and 70’s video artists who recorded their own banal acts and gave otherwise inconsequential physical motions importance via the then nascent time-based art medium. Utilizing minimal editing techniques, repetition, and corporal action to engage the observer, GM uses his body, voice, minimal studio props, and a single lens to create a whimsical and compelling oeuvre. Summoning the pace of the 1971 I Will Not Make Any Boring Art video that sees John Baldessari repeatedly writing these lines on a chalkboard, or the 1972 Baldessari Sings Lewitt where one artist actually sings the other’s conceptual statements, the videos in this show are not tautological. More like watching the making of Tibetan sand mandalas, GM forces the viewer to decelerate and observe his capricious, soothing, and obliquely mannered technique.

The installation is comprised of quotidian components: Royal blue painter’s tape and cotton fabric, white sacks of bleached flour and bright lighting, and walls lacking any sort of color-based adornment save the geometric forms and “words” made by the tape. GM creates a character in his video works whose age (with vocal intonations redolent of both a pre-schooler and an old man) is irrelevant and intelligence is nebulous. 2 computers, 2 projections, a video monitor, and 6 soundtracks on headphones that house the moving image and sound elements of the show juxtapose a ladder wrapped in blue tape and propped against the wall. The music (including the cheesy Sail Away by Enya and Telling Stories by Tracy Chapman) versus the objects in the show protracts the artist’s interest in divergent formal, sonic, and material textures. The bread scattered about capezio – signifying both the folding of dough and the kneading of meaning and language back into itself – becomes a baroque metaphor.

GM’s language-based explorations are silly and poignant, with tape on the walls simultaneously employed both to designate space and spell out quirky acronym titles like A.Q.E.D (Always Quoting Emily Dickinson), and J.A.T.D. (Japanamation Across the Dashboard). And the collision/collusion of the low (tape and flour) and the cerebral (temporal manifestations and linguistic exercises) posture the works in a realm difficult to categorize.

donkey (2009) 00:01:44, video still. Image courtesy of the artist and ltd.

In the video called “donkey” GM does a disco-dance of sorts – choreographing his opposing hands to rub the blue ladder rungs in a somewhat masturbatory fashion while finding an off-kilter, sing-song rhythmic repetition of the words “driving a truck, feeding a donkey, playing with my soup…”– and the piece ends with the character redemptively “drinking some soup.”

JATD (2009) 00:01:01, video still. Image courtesy of the artist and ltd.

Via formalist and performative maneuvers, GM’s capezio leads the viewer with elf-like nimbleness into a blue and white dreamland for a bit and then releases them — feeling a bit lighter and slightly confused — back into reality…where, in an unwelcome Los Angeles torrential downpour, the Dickinsonian quote, “The rain is wider than the sky” aptly makes the world seem a tad more perfect[.]

For more information please visit: www.ltdlosangeles.com For the videos detailed above please visit: www.aarongm.com This post was contributed by Annie Wharton.

 

Ry Rocklen @ Parker Jones

RY ROCKLEN at Parker Jones (Los Angeles)

Annie Wharton

RY ROCKLEN, House of Return, 2009. Installation view at Parker

Jones, Los Angeles. Courtesy Parker Jones, Los Angeles.

Mixing Dadaist playfulness with multi-denominational spiritualism, “House of Return” finds Ry Rocklen turning the quotidian into objects of reverence. Each of the works in the exhibition combines banal second-hand household objects with a pious work ethic, where found objects like a mattress, curtain, carpet remnants or rubber ball are given an aggrandized mummification. Tilting a nod to Arte Povera artist Giovanni Anselmo or ’60s sculpture by Robert Morris, Rocklen also utilizes acts of devotion and repetition to create a divine effect with the detritus from which his pieces are crafted.

Open Window, a sculpture made from a decomposing curtain emblazoned with the repeated word “Medium” has a strong yet ghostly presence, as if the cloth over a carcass-like armature attempts to channel the spirit world. Turtle Soup is formed from a deflated four-square ball and rocks, where concrete poured into the concave void left by a lack of air becomes a Star of David. The least transcendent piece, Light Health Medallion 2, is a rope hung exactly eight feet high with a meticulously painted disc, where the artist’s self-made mythology surrounding the amulet, amalgamated with the Thai Buddhist tradition of tying a string around structures, feels gimmicky.

However, with Rise, Rocklen redeems himself with a castaway mattress that recalls a slumping figure. Coated with a fastidious tile treatment similar to that of Byzantine smalti artists, the sheer physicality of the work covering the bed with blue, gray and white glass tiles is either a meditative exercise or a masochistic display of painstaking labor. The colored tiles create an obsessive simulacrum of the original pattern on the mattress that covers the whole structure, but for an edge of garish gold piping. Sending signals to the unearthly, Rocklen’s numinous journey dexterously resolves tensions between concepts of recycling, nostalgia and mysticism with a notable combination of muscle and grace.

-- Annie Wharton

Ice Cube @ the Grove

Ice Cube On Being the Architect of Gangsta Rap

By ANNIE WHARTON 

Axe to grind

Rapper. Actor. Architect? Most people don’t know Ice Cube earned a certificate in architecture from the Phoenix Institute of Technology. Y’know, just in case the genre-creating music thing didn’t work out. Those classes he took in 1987 taught Cube you need a detailed plan to build anything—be it a skyscraper or a gangsta-rap anthem like “Straight Outta Compton.”

“You can’t show up to a construction site without any plans,” he said. “I realized then that you have to calculate your moves and not just be willy-nilly about how you approach anything.”

Born O’Shea Jackson in 1969, Ice Cube derived his moniker from the pimp-turned-author Iceberg Slim. Characters such as Slim were common in the treacherous South-Central hood Cube once called home.

“It is the same story that most youngsters have growing up in a bad situation,” the rap icon expresses. “The people who make it are the ones who have hope in a situation that looks hopeless. And that is the key to getting out and being successful.

“You can’t let the surroundings beat you down and erode your character and spirit,” Cube continues. “You know, I might be living in the mud, but I refuse to get dirty. It’s about using your brain and not your back.”

A dismal economy, racial-profiling police and feuding inner-city youths made the late 1980s unruly times in Los Angeles. Cube was one of the pioneers of gangsta rap, chronicling the corruption and chaos he witnessed first-hand. This gritty, graphic, West Coast style of hip-hop proved more violent and explicit than anything previously heard in popular music.

Cube joined Arabian Prince, DJ Yella, Dr. Dre, Eazy-E and MC Ren to form the Compton-based N.W.A (Niggaz With Attitude) in 1986. Evoking the crime-infested streets of his upbringing, a menacing young Cube spit rhymes more imposing than anything issued by the rap godfathers who birthed the genre in the Bronx. The infamous N.W.A title “Fuck Tha Police” sums up their view of lawmen. On other numbers, the rappers glorify drug dealing, gunplay and misogyny, creating the template for a genre carried on today most famously by 50 Cent.

N.W.A’s most celebrated rhyme-writer left the group to release the potent solo CDs AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted (1990) and Death Certificate (’92), cementing Cube’s place as one of rap’s most socially aware and confrontational artists. LA’s notorious 1992 riots prompted further division between Cube and the cops.

“The riots were a buildup of the things going wrong with the policies of the LAPD and the rest of the Southern California law enforcement,” he says. “Before [‘Fuck Tha Police’], the police really could do no wrong. The exclamation point here is that there was a lot of injustice going on, and black people got fed up and decided to aim that injustice back at the police.”

After casting himself as a cop-hating, indo-smoking thug, Cube has built a second career as an actor (who has starred in kid-friendly flicks such as 2005’s Are We There Yet?), screenwriter and record producer.

The 40-year-old multihyphenate also controls the business aspects of his music. When he got frustrated with the major-label system, he started distributing his own records. He maintains that company executives don’t understand “street marketing and how to get [my] records down into the neighborhoods.”

“So I got tired of it and decided to put my money where my mouth was,” he says. “Now I can drop records when I want to. I have taken matters back into my own hands.”

Those hands are still making hard-hitting music with minimalist beats, body-dropping hooks and witty lyrics. Cube, who cites George Clinton, Bob Marley, Curtis Mayfield andChuck D. as influences, crafted a heavy dose of thoughtful darkness on his most recent record, Raw Footage. On the lead single, “Gangsta Rap Made Me Do It”—hailed by MTV as “the first great rap song of 2008”—he backhandedly dissed those who blame gangsta rap for tragic world events. When asked about the thought process behind the single, Cube says, “I’ve always wondered how you can expect to get the Crips and Bloods to stop fighting when you can’t get the Jews and Palestinians to quit fighting."

“People can hate each other over gangsta rap or religion,” he continues. “There’s really very little difference. I wanted to do a record that people can feel and not just hear, one that talks about solutions, not just problems.”

The veteran’s desire for said solutions is apparent on Raw Footage’s soulful, Mayfield-inspired “Stand Tall.” The track finds Cube encouraging listeners to hold onto their dreams. With more than 15 million records sold to date, Ice Cube has realized his own dreams by engineering a multifaceted empire that’s still standing strong.

Ice Cube at the Grove of Anaheim, 2200 E. Katella Ave., Anaheim

Dan Finsel @ Parker Jones

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Jet Set Saturdays: Dan Finsel at Parker Jones

In 1976, there came an idolatrous poster. Not just any idol, but the one many a young man would intently observe when his parents went out for dinner. With blond tresses, white perfect teeth, and nipples erect, the Farrah Fawcett red swimsuit poster became the image of choice for teenage predecessors to Generation X. Dan Finsel’s détournement, a new installment to his video series I Would Love Farrah, Farrah, Farrah…that he’s entitled I Could Be Anybody. I Could Be Somebody re-packages the poster, conversations Ms. Fawcett had on her deathbed, and an episode of Beverly Hills 90210 where Brenda Walsh thinks she might have cancer. The 20 minute video, shot in the artist’s Chinatown studio, finds the artist in seemingly uncomfortable outfits – a red one-piece swimsuit, a too large white oxford, a blond wig and tennis dress, and red Vuarnet-style glasses chipped and scratched from years of use. Throughout the piece, where Finsel is seen a front of green screen, one can detect the reflection of a Dan Flavin-esque sculpture in his glasses. The installation at Parker Jones that closes tomorrow (hurry, hurry!) also has a 54 x 96 inch fluorescent light sculpture called Untitled (To Farrah), where the artist riffs on the title Flavin himself would have given the piece had he made it for theCharlie’s Angels star, reifying the works of the Minimalist icon while referring to filmic vernacular via the 16:9 ratio of its proportions.

Dan Finsel, I Would Love Farrah, Farrah, Farrah (I), 2009 [still], HD video, 20:24, Ed. 3 + 1 AP

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Gallery says: “The totality of Dan Finsel’s work is driven by a central character; one that he constructed in the Fall of 2008, and one in which he continues to embody through performance, video, and various paraphernalia. This personality is an amalgamation of various mediaconstructed subjectivities, specifically those from popular film and television. Finsel adopts these roles and their associated narratives through the character of a schizophrenic and self-obsessed man-child. Emotionally and ethically educated through the chronicles of coming-of-age teenage melodramas, “Finsel” exists within a conflation between the logic of a Peewee Herman’s Playhouse and Andy Kaufman, reality TV and filmed studio performance art…

Dan Finsel, I Would Love Farrah, Farrah, Farrah (I), 2009 [still], HD video, 20:24, Ed. 3 + 1 AP

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Shiny white patent vinyl flooring is installed in the gallery — the kind of substructure employed for sexy rap music videos and glam-y fashion spreads — and the theatricality of the floor and fluorescent lighting juxtaposed by the quirky, ironic video is unnerving. Using Stanislavsky acting techniques, “Finsel” repeats lines over and over and over into his iPhone: “If I keep talking I’ll cry,” and “I’m a private person, I’m shy about people knowing things…” The repetition creates an awkward, almost cloying presence, one that drags the viewer in and then keeps her there through angst-riddled reiteration. The cyclical nature and cadence of the piece allows one to see Finsel’s progression/regression of emotions, a process where the subject re-structuralizes television as he morphs into different incarnations of the character and his psychology. Beads of sweat on the artist’s forehead mark his torment, and the video ends with him giddily taking off the white dress to reveal that iconic red tank suit. Genitals slightly exposed, wig askew, and posed like Farrah did back in the day, Dan Finsel’s dérive unsettles the viewer just enough to elicit a similar sort of teenage anxiety as one might feel if left alone in a room with a certain poster for an extremely long time.

Dan Finsel, Untitled (To Farrah), 2009. Single tube fluorescent lights, 54 x 96 inches.

Parker Jones is located at 510 Bernard Street, Los Angeles, CA 90012. 

For more information please visit www.parkerjonesgallery.com

This post was contributed by Annie Wharton.

Puppies!

The Best of Loop: Remote Viewing @ Pacific Design Center

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Jet Set Saturday’s: “The Best of Loop: Remote Viewing” at the Pacific Design Center

Screen cap from Secret Life by Reynold Reynolds from the exhibition The Best of Loop: Remote Viewing.

WeHo is back on Artlurker’s A-list for Art Loves Design at the Pacific Design Center. The initiative hosts a bevy of artist-driven and gallery-initiated projects within a floor of vacant design showrooms. From Carl Berg Gallery’s expansive show (see the cardboard tree constructions by Allen Tombello), to the brilliant “library” installation of painter Monique Van Genderen juxtaposed in a space by the physically daunting clay works of Roger Herman, to Bari Ziperstein’s assiduous ceramic/collage mélange at See Line Gallery’s space, the undertaking features oodles of alt-galleries with which to whet one’s whistle.

Some of the galleries and artists selected for the project leave the viewer wanting more, but the strongest show in West Hollywood’s PDC is easily found in The Best of Loop: Remote Viewing, curated by writer and video art scholar Paul Young. An elaborate exhibition featuring 39 videos from Europe, the Middle East, Latin America and Asia, the show investigates a plethora of contemporary video art methodologies. Culled from multiple trips to the Loop video art fair in Barcelona, Young was originally asked to curate this show for LACMA just before the financial meltdown. But, as has been the case in multiple recent museum exhibitions, the host organization elected to drop the idea for financial reasons.

Paul Young

Says Young, author of Art Cinema (Taschen, November 2009): “I didn’t give up. I devoted an entire year towards finding the resources, money, venue and artists to participate. And in this financial climate, that’s pretty amazing, if I do say so myself. I’ve been talking to several museums recently about taking this show and everyone says, “Video? No way… too expensive.” Yet I managed to do it all by myself with VERY little help. If a freelance journalist can do it, anyone should be able to do it. If there are curators out there, or artists, who are frustrated by the paltry shows being presented at museums at the moment, I think they should go out there and put together a show of their own!”

This writer concurs. Despite its limited budget, Remote Viewing’s meticulous compendium of videos runs the gamut of work being made in the medium today. Shown in rotation throughout the day, with each work exploring a different concern, themes vary from the body-based to the political to the ridiculous, and Young’s thoughtful and exhaustive research is apparent. In addition to two black box spaces designed by architect Matthew Gilio-Tenan where single channel videos are projected, dozens of monitor and wall works are also included in the show. England’s Wood & Harrison create droll, physical situations that veer close to the conceptual practice of both John Baldessari and Fischli & Weiss, but possess a singular vision that makes their work unique. The Netherland’s Jacco Olivier paints colorful, layered animations depicting the banal on glass, where everyday occurrences, portraits and pastoral scenes distinctively comment on the practice of painting while observing the temporal nature of video. The hilarious is trotted out with the work of Israeli artist Nira Pereg, where dozens of flamingos in an encapsulated environment hear gunshots and “duck”…the choreography of the work couldn’t be better. But the shot-caller of the exhibition is undoubtedly the time-lapse video by Berlin’s Reynold Reynolds.  Plants grow quickly, clocks spin uncontrollably, and a woman’s corporal gesticulations played in reverse are absolutely unsettling. The stunning, nearly 15-minute work finds itself hovering between gorgeous and bewildering, with richness of intent and technological prowess shining throughout.

Screen cap from Secret Life by Reynold Reynolds from the exhibition The Best of Loop: Remote Viewing. 

“Most of the work comes from larger studio practices, and much of it is highly polished and often wildly entertaining. Yet at the same time, it’s also very expressive of the times we’re living in, and much of it conveys a distinctly different point of view,” states Young.

Pondering so many different points of view has the potential to be daunting, but Remote Viewing sturdily posits itself as the most inspiring video exhibition in California, if not the US, for 2009[.]

This post was contributed by Annie Wharton.

Susan Anderson @ Kopeikin Gallery

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A MIAMI BASED CONTEMPORARY ART NEWSLETTER / BLOG

Jet Set Saturdays: Susan Anderson at Kopeikin Gallery

Susan Anderson, Mary Ashton (2009)

After getting our hair done at Cush Salon by the pixie-like Karina (who employs punk rock styling with a 90210 sensibility), we meandered over to West Hollywood’s Kopeikin Gallery for the first US solo exhibition by Los Angeles-based Susan Anderson. “High Glitz: The Extravagant World of Child Beauty Pageants” is a glitzy trip down Henry Giroux’s road of “public pedagogy” (a Situationist-like term he coined to describe the nature of the spectacle and new media).

Gallery says: “Children’s beauty pageants are a fascinating phenomenon with over-the-top aesthetics and billions in revenue. However, more than anything, they represent a strange microcosm of America itself and its values of beauty, success and glamor as reflected in the dreams of thousands of young girls. “High Glitz” elucidates the enthusiasm with which the children take part in these ritualized spectacles of crafted female beauty…”

Juxtaposing baby beauty queens with their baroque accoutrements, and finishing it all off with retouching techniques a la David LaChappelle, Anderson’s been documenting the Little Miss Sunshine phenomenon for the past three years. Traveling throughout the US to shoot her candy-coated series of disconcerting portraits on location, the new series of photographs look into the minds of the pre-pre-pubescent in an unsettling way. Setting up her studio amidst the dreams and aspirations of grandeur – or at least glimmers of hope for a sparkling crown – Anderson captures young girls made-up and glittery, ready to be judged. Along with the bambini bella in the exhibit, there are fetishistic objects and cherished components of the competitive world of glamor and façade – Cinderella-like slippers, 18 inch rhinestone tiaras and prized trophies, ribbons, and sashes – contest artifacts that delve beyond the surface and into the psychology of ritual, performance, and artifice. Under a bright and shiny veneer, while asking significant questions about exploitation and children’s roles, Anderson nimbly investigates complex, surreal representations of our youth-worshiping culture[.]

This post was contributed by Annie Wharton.

múm @ Yost Theater

Iceland's múm are at the Cutting Edge of Cool

By ANNIE WHARTON

From the Land of the Ice and Snow

With their dreamy-yet-unnerving sounds and surreal visuals, múm are at the cutting edge of Icelandic cool

James Kendall

Thinking warm thoughts

Múm’s quirky, artistic music videos are an integral part of their repertoire. The band have worked with a variety of video artists to create moving-image accompaniment to their elfin arrangements. Incorporating both Icelandic iconography and surreal fantasy tropes, they range widely in imagery from funhouse mirrors to goats to stop-motion graphic drawings.

Reached just before a sound check in Toronto last week, múm lead singer/guitarist Örvar Þóreyjarson Smárason discussed how the varied video artists used for the band’s songs are selected. Conscious of the potential for syrupy arrangements, múm seem to make a concerted effort to incorporate a bit of the ugly and perplexing into their works.

“Since we come up with a theme and let the artist take off with it, it’s very important that there is a certain friction, to create nuances between the music and the videos,” Smárason said. “It can’t be too sweet, and there are actually a few múm videos that have never seen the light of day because the melding of music and visuals felt too saccharine.”

This not-too-sweet formula also pervades the music of múm (which, according to their publicist, “rhymes with ‘gloom’ and ‘doom’”). Two years after the release of their fourth album, the eccentric Scandinavian pop maestros are touring to support their new Sing Along to Songs You Don’t Know. Quieter and a bit more morose than the band’s prior output, Sing Along’s songs fluidly sample, layer and re-configure sounds using a wealth of subtle methods and noisemaking techniques. From the complicated (computer sequencing, a full choir and studio mix tricks) to the quotidian (Smárason’s parents’ parakeet, a half-full pot of water and a xylophone), múm draw on many different sources for musical sounds and ideas.

“We don’t really dissect what influences what in our music,” Smárason states. “Nature and our surroundings have a lot to do with the sound, but that’s not the overarching theme of this record. And though there are some elements that are specifically Icelandic, like traditional folk and pop music from the ’50s and ’60s, we look to all kinds of music for inspiration.”

Fellow Icelanders Elly Vilhjálmsdóttir and Magnus Blondal Jóhannsson seem especially influential in múm’s songs, as do the Sugarcubes (of course) and the generation of similar artists popular in the late ’80s. Using a lot of piano, guitar, bass and drums, múm also deliver the kalimba, ukulele, marimba and vibraphone to their sonic tapestry. The current tour includes the two founding members, with Smárason on guitar and Gunnar Örn Tynes on bass, and the lineup is expanded to include friends Eiríkur Orri Ólafsson (trumpet/piano/keyboards), Hildur Guðnadóttir (cello/vocals), Sigurlaug Gísladóttir (vocals/ukulele/percussion), Róbert Reynisson (guitar/ukulele) and Samuli Kosminen (drums/percussion).

In the past, water has been a crucial component to múm’s music: Liquid noises show up frequently in recordings, the band staged the score for Sergei Eisenstein’s epic Battleship Potemkin at both the Brooklyn Lyceum and Spain’s Gijon Film Festival, and they also once performed at an Icelandic public pool and used underwater speakers so listeners had to be submerged to hear anything. This time around, múm’s members assert in their press kit that the new record is “an ode to the light in its different shapes . . . from a fading bulb to the blinding sun.”

These distinctive shades of light (and dark) are evident in the haunting melodies and mesmerizing rhythms of the new album, where those paying attention can deconstruct the complex layering of musical artistry . . . or simply enjoy a winding path paved in an assortment of intellectual fairy dust.

múm play with Sin Fang Bous at the Yost TheaterTh, 307 Spurgeon St., Santa Ana, (888) 862-9573.

Fernando Botero @ Bowers Museum

Girl on a Horse by Fernando Botero, 1961

By ANNIE WHARTON 

With shows such as Project Runway and America’s Next Top Model receiving unprecedented ratings, it’s small wonder that eating disorders continue to top the list of maladies for teenage girls. In 2007, Uruguayan fashion model Eliana Ramos died from self-starvation only six months after her sister collapsed on the runway and perished from a heart attack caused by malnutrition, causing the fashion industry to re-evaluate its idea of the waif and add a minimum body-mass-index requirement for catwalk-ers.

In the Bowers Museum’s “The Baroque World of Fernando Botero” exhibition, body dysmorphia is preponderant in a very different way. Rotundity, stigmatized in contemporary society, remains a historical symbol of wealth and fertility (consider the more than 24,000-year-old Venus of Willendorf, the famous Paleolithic sculpture with a tiny head, miniscule arms, and a large belly and breasts). This exhibit celebrates “extra” attributes while injecting a simultaneous sensitivity and brashness into many of the works.

Botero is known more for his commercialism and corpulent figures than his painterly brushstroke or psychological interpretations. The Colombian artist’s works have ostensibly occupied an anodyne place in contemporary art. While somewhat ironic and witty, they are usually safe and predictable: bucolic scenes of women more Rubenesque than even Rubens would have painted, still-lifes in which hyperbolic bananas resemble overstuffed sausages and banal bronze sculptures. Amassed from his own private collection, the first North American retrospective of his work since 1974 attempts to present an alternate perspective of the world’s most recognizable South American artist. Viewers with preconceived notions about the prosaic intent of the 77-year-old South American are deliberately challenged by a distinctive mélange of painting, sculpture and works on paper. Yes, everyone’s obese (and mostly in a beautiful way), but the exhibition of 100 pieces also brings forth works that are complex, sinister, dark and deep.

The first painting one encounters is an existential riff on the 17th-century Dutch masters. House of Marta Pintucco is an oil-on-canvas rendering of a whorehouse with conspicuous memento mori (“Remember that you will die”) undertones, a chaotic mess in which the painter has carefully imbued each of his subjects with a certain pathos. Two men sleep, one holds a whiskey and vies for action with an uninterested prostitute, while another lady struggles with her yellow brassiere. The floor is littered with a cross-eyed baby, snuffed cigarettes, a half-eaten meal and an empty liquor bottle. Marta Pintucco, the madam, clutches the doorframe with a gnarled hand, her nails painted siren-red.

Botero excels at drawing; he creates an ordered uneasiness, especially when he makes reference to the terror, violence and political instability of his country. A series of pencil, charcoal and sanguine works on paper featuring the downtrodden and destitute are particularly compelling. A Mother shows a woman holding her dying child, her head back and mouth open, tears streaming down her anguished face. And in Displaced Persons, a refugee sits on the ground among his belongings, holding his head in his hands as he wonders what has happened to his family, a little doll haphazardly placed atop the baskets, pans and bundles serving as the only reminder of his child.

The paintings and drawings produced in his signature fashion and based on masterworks by Delacroix, Ingres, Picasso and Van Gogh fall flat. Each is technically adroit and possesses a sort of whimsical humor, but they all exist as gimmicky copies of the originals. Similar are the paintings done in the style of the Spanish Colonial Baroque, in which extravagance, decoration and pious Catholicism are skillfully manifested, yet the feeling these works elicit is one of indifference. The 16 bronze sculptures in the exhibition seem a commerce-driven afterthought, though the sumptuous Italian-gray-marble Still Life takes a decent stab at redeeming the sculptor.

The show’s highlights are from the late ’50s and early ’60s, a series of paint-laden, loose and chunky constructions. Notable works from the period include The Boy From Vellacas, a haunting image of a dead dwarf, and Homage to Ramón Hoyos, in which a stylized battle is created using Fauve colors and painting techniques. The strongest of this era, Girl On a Horse, nods at Velásquez while maintaining a strong sense of self. A huge head formed by anxious, scratchy strokes takes up most of the image, while thick, Phillip Guston-like brushwork in pastel colors makes up the foreground to create a rich, dynamic tension.

Botero’s “Baroque World” is ultimately a successful foray into finding ways around the poster-print marketing for which he has become famous. And in the end, it is the fat lady who sings.

“The Baroque World of Fernando Botero” at the Bowers Museum of Cultural Art, 2002 N. Main St., Santa Ana,             (714) 550-0906      ; www.bowers.org.