Show’s Pairing Invites Comparison of Depth

LA JOLLA —  Mark Quint closed his downtown gallery two years ago, after seven years of showing contemporary art there and in La Jolla. He has been dealing privately ever since and is now scheduling exhibitions again, open to the public by appointment. Though having no gallery hours puts the casual viewer at a disadvantage, Quint’s shows are bound to satisfy the more diligent followers who have been left starved by San Diego’s dearth of serious contemporary galleries.

For his current show, through Oct. 28, Quint has paired New York painter Gary Lang with British sculptor Richard Wentworth. Each is represented by only three or four works, but these suffice to suggest the rich, memorable humor of Wentworth’s work and at the same time, the shallowness of Lang’s.

Quint has exhibited Lang’s paintings (and sculptural “Weapons”) since he opened his first La Jolla gallery in 1981. In his earlier work, Lang flung a confetti of color across his canvases. Patches of fluorescent orange and DayGlo green nuzzled up to smudges of white, gray, blue and a plethora of other hues.

In his last show at Quint’s downtown space, Lang tucked fragments of dizzying Op Art patterns as well as motifs from comic strips and magazines into the frantic fold, extending the metaphor of loosely reined chaos from the picture plane to society at large. The buoyancy, energy and vibrancy of these works proved irresistible.

Lang’s current work demands much more of the viewer, but offers much less in return. The artist, who moved from Los Angeles to New York several years ago, has retained his exuberant palette but tidied up his compositions to such an extreme that his canvases now hum in a dull monotone, where they used to rattle and buzz. Instead of packing the surface with patches of color, he now lays down evenly spaced horizontal and vertical bands, and calls the paintings “Plaids.”

The size of the canvases and stripes, and the densities suggested in each grid do vary, but not enough to wrest the paintings away from their staid, lackluster premise. A large, circular canvas bearing concentric rings of color also falls flat, despite its kaleidoscopic palette.

Like Frank Stella’s acclaimed stripe paintings of the 1960s, Lang’s confront the viewer with a “what you see is what you get” obviousness and simplicity. Like Stella, Lang uses the shape of his canvas to determine the patterns within; one echoes the other, and this resonance is the basis of the painting. In the art world of the ‘60s, Stella’s statement was revolutionary, for it snubbed the heroic rhetoric of Abstract Expressionist painting and countered with a spare, unemotional formalism. In the context of its time, Stella’s work was radical, startlingly empty, yet ultimately refreshing.

Lang has borrowed much from Stella’s enterprise, and in the current art world such recycling of modes and motifs from the past is common. Lang’s work strikes a vastly different chord in this context, however, than did Stella’s in his. One of the primary messages of the current craze for appropriation is that the postmodern age is bankrupt, unable to muster true originality and thus is resigned to rehash the innovations of the past. The argument is feeble, desperate and highly popular. Whether Lang’s current work is an outgrowth of this line of thought, or merely an uneventful exercise in line and color, he has shown himself to be much wiser in the past, and much more fun.

Richard Wentworth’s sculptures act as a foil to Lang’s work, for they restore faith in the alchemical potential of art, its ability to transform the base into the precious, the common into the extraordinary.

One of a cluster of young British sculptors to abandon stone and bronze to take up more common, industrial materials, Wentworth wields a mighty wit to transform these familiar surfaces into unfamiliar, curious forms. He welds together three large, galvanized steel washtubs in a squirming line and calls the work, “Eel.” A flat plate of steel fits snugly inside the tubs, creating a smooth, even surface reminiscent of calm water. A small oval hole toward the bottom of one of the tubs doubles as the eye for this newfangled creature or, perhaps, an escape hole for the real animal of the title. Ambiguity thrives in Wentworth’s work, and it is often a rich, rewarding ambiguity.

In “Other Geologies,” Wentworth mounts a rectangular steel box on the wall, horizontally, leaving one small end open. Two diamond-shaped openings are visible from the top. From the open end, these cavities reveal themselves to be shaped like generic houses, boxy, with pitched roofs, yet upside down. The house form recurs throughout Wentworth’s work, and in every case, it defies expectations, changing from the stable, upright model of shelter to a tilted, hollow, vulnerable shell.

Wentworth encourages the viewer’s exploration by offering competing or contradictory interpretations of the same object from different viewpoints. Meaning vacillates too, as the artist wryly disrupts the familiar and interjects a slice of the odd, obtuse or simply amusing.

For an appointment to see the show, call 454-3409.