THE OUTSIDERS : A Curator Assembles Wonderfully Odd and Touching Works by 64 Artists on the Fringes

“Outsider” artists are aesthetic mavericks who work in spontaneous, idiosyncratic ways equally remote from conservative and cutting-edge styles. Some of these people are mentally ill; others simply are untrained in art and unaware of (or unconcerned with) contemporary aesthetic standards.

Remarkably, Irvine Fine Arts Center curator Dorrit Fitzgerald has found works by 64 of these artists for “Outside the Mainstream in Orange County.” A gratifying number of pieces are wonderfully weird, poignant or funny (whether intentionally or not)--a tribute to Fitzgerald’s taste, persistence and detective skills in her 10th year at the center.

Some of the artists tackle awkward topics with cool aplomb; others treat seemingly trivial subjects with immense gravity; still others give serious ideas an unintentionally silly spin by exaggerating emotions to the breaking point.

Looking at the best outsider art is like listening to an unusually persuasive crank whose harangue is so narrowly focused, so internally logical, and yet so utterly blind to the way the rest of the world functions that it constitutes a weird parallel universe. Yet there can be a certain cruelty involved in admiring such work--the humor the sophisticated observer perceives may be wildly at odds with the sober motivation of the artist.

Signs of vulnerability and psychic torment are ubiquitous in outsider art, but they produce intriguing works of art only when the imagery departs radically from familiar forms. Some pieces in the show don’t rise above ordinary bad art--the cluttered, derivative, confused kind you can see any day of the week in unsophisticated galleries.

Fitzgerald’s decision to include artists who (as she writes in a statement) make “mainstream” art but “are isolated by choice or circumstance,” was a miscalculation. Since all we have to go on is their art, it often looks as though their isolation might be a result of lack of ability. Others make well-crafted, even witty work that simply isn’t strange enough to hobnob with the space cadets.

Fortunately, there’s enough good stuff to make rummaging through the show akin to wandering through a swap meet on a very lucky day.

Some works stand out by virtue of their unconventional use of homely materials, such as Willis Maxon’s “Stick Man” (tree limbs forming an endearingly gawky male figure), John Breitweiser’s “Jan. 10, 1993” (a big red sneaker memorializing a victim of alleged gay-bashing in Laguna Beach), or Francie Hanson’s “Button Up Rubber Chicken” (a figure made from castoff odds and ends, with a rusted, broken suitcase strap serving as the fellow’s dangling private parts).

Other works are fun as pure fantasy. Leonard Kaplan’s impossibly dense collages of Victorian illustrations of exotic animals (“Jungle in Flames”) create a suffocatingly unnatural world. In Helga Schweininger’s delicious “Happy Celebration,” an old-fashioned biplane prepares to land on a delicately lighted airstrip graced by an early ‘60s-style theme restaurant-cum-space station.

But most of the better pieces are intriguing primarily because of the naively open way they deal with such perennial themes as sex, religion, alienation, aging and death.

In “The Blue Chair,” gray-haired Helen Michlin unapologetically shows herself topless, with a thumb hooked provocatively inside her red boxer shorts. Her expressionless face, painted in a flat amateurish style, somehow makes the image even more bizarre.

Jade Jewitt paints an unavoid able aspect of life as a couple that somehow rarely makes it to the realm of fine arts. In “Morning Breath,” a woman reaches to hug a bare-chested guy with a cloud of reddish-white paint issuing from his open mouth.

Gregory Lincoln’s two paintings both treat religious themes in the sort of pure, awe-struck way--uncomplicated by skill in three-dimensional rendering--that we tend to associate with medieval art. In “Moses and the Burning Bush,” Moses is a reed-thin barefoot guy in a long brown robe with thin red stripes greeted by a flat white angel with a huge decorative wing. Red lines fanning out in the lone bush form a pictograph fire.

The wildly distorted heads of Joann Grossman’s angry mothers (“Your Mother Doesn’t Work Here--Clean Up for Yourself”) appear to have been influenced by Picasso’s paintings of the late 1930s, the period of “Guernica.” But the impetus for maternal rage is not war or death but such banalities as a lapful of socks to be sorted or a dirty toilet.

Gardan (who goes by one name) is the author of “Awakening,” in which one anthropomorphic stamen in a field of oversized calla lilies lifts off its orange “head” while a neighbor watches, aghast. The painting treats the pain of “coming out” with pert stylization reminiscent of a 1930s cartoon.

There isn’t room here to linger over all the “finds” Fitzgerald has assembled, but this review can’t end without mentioning Michael Hinkel’s decorated shells and rocks, with their curious range from boring kitsch (cats and ladybugs) to deadpan slogans (“This rock stays in the bathroom”) and improbable proclamations (“How can we raise the level of taste in Laguna Beach?”).

It’s comforting to know that, however lean the art scene may seem in Orange County, people we’ve never heard of are quietly cooking up such strange and wonderful visual feasts.

* What: “Outside the Mainstream in Orange County.”

* When: Noon to 9 p.m. Monday; 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. Tuesday through Thursday; 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Friday; 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturday; 1 to 5 p.m. Sunday. Through Feb. 27.

* Where: Irvine Fine Arts Center, 14321 Yale Ave., Irvine.

* Whereabouts: Exit the San Diego (405) Freeway on Culver Drive (going north); right on Walnut Avenue; left on Yale Avenue.

* Wherewithal: Free.

* Where to call: (714) 552-1018.

IN NEWPORT BEACH: BIENNIAL

“Fourth Newport Biennial: Southern California 1993,” at Newport Harbor Art Museum (through Jan. 30), offers a sampler of work by 18 mostly younger artists. Artists include Kim Dingle, Adam Ross, Paul Tzanetopoulos, Martin Mull and Mara Lonner. (714) 759-1122.

IN LOS ANGELES: ‘VIJA CELMINS’

A survey of the extraordinary life’s work of a 55-year-old female artist whose drawn and painted images of everyday objects and natural sights (the ocean; the night sky) often have a curiously abstract quality, runs through Feb. 6 at the Museum of Contemporary Art. (213) 626-6222.

IN LOS ANGELES: DANISH ART

“The Golden Age of Danish Painting,” at the L.A. County Museum of Art (through Jan. 2), presents landscapes, city views, portraits and domestic scenes, painted between 1780 and 1850 by such little-known masters as Christen Kobke and Johan Thomas Lundbye. (213) 857-6000.