ART : Artists’ Inventive Metaphors Save Poorly Focused Exhibit

IRVINE —  There’s no terror to speak of in “The Pleasure and the Terror: An Exhibition of Landscape,” at the UC Irvine Fine Arts Gallery (through Feb. 10). But there is the pleasure of seeing some evocative and well-conceived work by Los Angeles artists Lynn Aldrich and Richard Sedivy.

While Aldrich works in a cool, ironic way, using mostly “found” objects, Sedivy’s mixed-media paintings are intense and personal. At their best, both artists translate ideas and feelings into idiosyncratic, inventive visual metaphors.

The exhibit does have its problems, however. They include a pompous and misleading title, a glib brochure essay that wanders off into irrelevant remarks about the writer’s personal experiences, and some works that frankly don’t make much sense. In the end, it isn’t clear why these two artists were grouped together, or even whether landscape is actually their chief concern.

The title probably was meant to allude to the writings of 18th-Century English essayist Edmund Burke. He is known for an essay on “the sublime,” in which he discusses the way that “terrible” objects--like dark, vast, and lonely landscapes--create strong emotions in the viewer. But even a baffling work by Aldrich called “Landscape for Edmund Burke”--in which concentric rectangles of staples take the place of a real landscape image--fails to amplify or justify the title reference.

In her brochure essay, gallery director Melinda Wortz makes the claim that the two artists “speak about the plights of the natural world.” But their work actually seems to have little to do with ecological issues. The closest the art comes to taking a stand on that subject is a fine piece by Aldrich called “Subdivision,” which works its magic through subtle metaphor by rearranging common objects into a strikingly pristine abstract form.

Tightly enclosed within a square white-picket fence, individual pickets jostle each other every which way, their arrowlike points bristling in an animated manner. The piece is a wonderful shorthand for the ubiquitous clusters of like houses built on small parcels of land. Still, one would hardly use the word “plight” in connection with this piece. It takes note of a condition of life without making a fuss about it.

In both artists’ works, landscape imagery is generally a way of dealing with other issues. Most of Sedivy’s paintings on wood contain an image of a flat, nearly featureless green landscape. But the eye tends to bypass it in favor of the large central panel on which thin white lines of paint pick out the skeletal images of a house or a portion of a house (an archway, a floating strip of molding).

The landscapes in these dreamy, elegiac works seem remote and obscure, as if recalled years after they were seen. The vacant, incomplete houses never suggest the warmth and stability of real homes. Air pushes through the spaces between their posts and beams, and the facades don’t seem to have anything solid behind them.

Even the single leaves, logs and branches that surround the lone archway in “A Mingling of Voices,” a particularly haunting and delicately rendered tone poem in paint, are isolated in individual geometric frames.

The appeal of these paintings is in their evocation of mood and the unusual handling of paint. In some of them, long, thin white vertical marks look as though they could be peeled right off the surface, amplifying the transitory mood.

It was somewhat awkward to learn, via statements by Sedivy reproduced in the brochure, that the imagery in his paintings stems from a year of personal upheaval--divorce and the abandonment of his home. Somehow, this knowledge tends to close down the range of meanings the works might have.

To be sure, darkness, instability and separation all figure into Sedivy’s images. But the more the work seems specifically to allude to Sedivy’s own worries, the less broadly evocative it is. In “A Brooding Madness,” a tangled skein of real rope pressing on the painted landscape is meant to represent a mind in turmoil, the artist says. Alas, that tight, one-to-one correspondence weighs down the painting, too, keeping it from being more than a metaphor for a particular moment in someone’s life.

Aldrich’s output is more uneven. Her conceptual abilities seem to have deserted her in “Packaged Landscape,” a gold-framed painting covered in layers of plastic wrap. Too many artists have “packaged” objects, and the act has lost its novelty. On the other hand, Aldrich had the eye to see a pair of salt licks--a mineral rock deposit that nourishes animals--as extraordinary “found” sculptures reminiscent of the work of Henry Moore.

The constant friction of animal tongues has worn a circular opening in one of the two blocks of salt in “Sculpture Found While Seeking Landscape” and turned both into a complex of soft bumps and depressions. Found in a landscape, the pieces also seem to imitate the hills and valleys of the natural world, as do Moore’s well-known undulating sculptures.

Borrowing--with a tongue-in-cheek flair--from traditional display techniques of natural history museums, Aldrich plops the salt chunks on a bed of artificial grass and covers them with Plexiglas. In this way they become artifacts plucked from their natural surroundings and presented to the viewer in the simulated reality of a hermetically sealed-off display.

Aldrich’s “Conservatory” consists of a table with a drawer that holds a swatch of real moss and a small chest of drawers, each containing a black-and-white painting of the sky, a mountain, a meadow, a forest and the sea. In this piece, the artist--an English major during her undergraduate days--appears to be playing with both meanings of the word “conservatory”: greenhouse and academy (of art).

Aldrich seems to be translating a mental concept--the dry art historical storehouse of landscape images, grouped according to separate categories--into a literal object. Seen that way, the images seem awfully dry and unpersuasive in contrast to the vivacious presence of a swatch of live moss. But it isn’t clear why all the landscape images are in black and white. The work might have been more focused had Aldrich used, say, reproductions of famous landscape paintings. Part of her growth as an artist may involve figuring out when a “found” image may be more appropriate to her work than one of her own creation.

“The Pleasure and the Terror: An Exhibition of Landscape” continues through Feb. 10 at the UC Irvine Fine Arts Gallery, off Bridge Road. Hours are noon to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday. Admission is free. Information: (714) 856-6610.