ART REVIEW : ‘Sculptors’ Looks Good on Paper : Show of Prints and Drawings Reveals Some Interesting Paths to 3-D

COSTA MESA —  Sculptors may think in 3-D, but they generally work out ideas in the handier, cheaper two-dimensional formats. “Sculptors’ Work on Paper,” at the BankAmerica Gallery (through Dec. 23), offers drawings and prints that range from detailed plans for specific sculptures to ideas of a seemingly more speculative nature.

Unfortunately, the show--drawn entirely from the bank’s collection, as are all the exhibitions in this space--doesn’t include any sculptures by the 18 artists, or even any photographs of their work. This omission points up a major difference between a corporate gallery and a museum, where (insofar as budget and space allow) one can expect to see a more fully realized curatorial project.

In other ways, however, the exhibition is a treat. Several of the drawings and prints are most engaging on the level of tactile immediacy, others as precisely plotted systems and still others as fanciful universes unto themselves.

Richard Serra’s severe, environmentally scaled steel sculptures are engaged with such issues as gravity and viewpoint. His oil-stick drawing for “Clara-Clara XI” shows two identical, roughly C-shaped dark blocks placed back-to-back with a small space in-between.

The sharp delineation of that space--the greasy blackness ends as abruptly as if it had been sheared away by a carving knife--points up its importance as the fulcrum of the piece. Whether intended, the shadowy nimbus that hovers around the edges of the drawing suggests the palpable energy that radiates from Serra’s aggressive slabs.

Jackie Ferrara’s four graphite drawings map out every last detail--down to the direction of the wood grain--of a piece called “Boundaries.” It is one of the artist’s pyramids of variously stacked lengths of wood, which combines a sense of ritual, architectural presence and psychological dialogue between surface and interior space.

Claes Oldenburg is famous for his soft, oversize sculptures of familiar objects, some of which have been built on a monumental scale. His jaunty lithograph “Letter Q as a Beach House with Sailboat” shows a giant yellow Q poking its tail in the air near a grove of trees by a lake. You don’t quite see how the concept works architecturally, but the image conjures up a scene of madcap bliss.

Some of the works in the show invite the viewer to watch the artist playing around with early stages of an idea, while others appear more or less resolved.

Peter Shelton’s sculptures convey the metaphorical presence of objects rather than a literal representation, as can be seen in his works in the Newport Harbor Art Museum show “The Essential Gesture.”

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In his graphite drawing “Bucket, Gut,” Shelton plays around with the shape and scale of both receptacles, as if to accentuate the difference between our clear mental image of “bucket” and the vague region we refer to mostly in times of digestive stress. (Perhaps the idea of putting both objects together came from “gutbucket,” a style of jazz performance named after the saloon bucket that catches gin running out of a barrel.)

Joel Shapiro’s monochrome lithographs of flattened shapes are already fully worked out, though it’s unclear quite how they would translate to three dimensions. Recalling his metal sculptures of ultra-simplified domestic objects, the prints offer the most minimal hints of object-hood: a hat, a hut and what appears to be a sidelong view of green cushions for a patio chair. The extreme simplification gives each shape a curiously hyper-real abstracted presence.

Somewhere between the experimental and resolved states of these works is Richard Artschwager’s drawing “Door, Window, Table, Basket, Mirror, Rug.” Known for creating perceptual shifts between real and fake surfaces in his sculptural “furniture,” Artschwager transforms his pen into a fabulist’s tool, weaving a miscellaneous group of furnishings into a weirdly plausible single component.

Other artists in the show include Larry Bell, John Buck, Alexander Calder, Bryan Hunt, Mark Lere, Henry Moore, Robert Stackhouse and Frances Whitehead.

* “Sculptors’ Work on Paper,” through Dec. 23 at the BankAmerica Gallery, 555 Anton Blvd., Costa Mesa. Hours: 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday through Wednesday and Friday; 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Thursday. Free. (714) 433-6000.

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SECOND LOOK: A caller alerted me to an oversight in my recent review of “Los Anthropolocos: New Digs at Mission Viejo--In Search of the Colorless Hands,” an installation by Richard Lou and Robert Sanchez at Saddleback College Art Gallery (through Thursday).

During the half-hour or so I had spent in the gallery, pondering what appeared to be a good satirical idea that wasn’t sufficiently thought through, a blue light flashed over a box of sand. I figured it was meant to suggest a “blue-light special” at a discount store--a pop culture-inflected put-down of anthropological discoveries.

My caller informed me that the lighting effect actually was produced by a long videotape in rewind mode. So I returned for a second look. As it happened, I also had missed out on a handout sheet explaining various objects attached to the walls and a handout map revealing the locations of three outdoor “excavations” (neither handout was in the gallery on my first visit).

A tongue-in-cheek archeological study of an extinct people known as the Colorless, undertaken in the distant future when nonwhite peoples rule the land, the installation does make much more sense seen in its entirety. But it still suffers from presentational problems.

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The video consists of clips from an old horror movie (a white-bandaged mummy portrayed as the savage “other”) and “Raiders of the Lost Ark” (archeologists as smugly “civilized” guardians of dominant culture), interwoven with tedious scenes of the two artists laboring over a small plot of land on campus with the “tools” hanging on the gallery walls.

The “dig sites” seem extraneous to the satire, however, and probably would be utterly baffling to anyone happening upon them without seeing the gallery portion of the piece.

Because the humorous point of the “tools” is entirely contained in the written descriptions, the video scenes of the artists at work also add little content. A tighter, more visually arresting format likely would better suit this broad satire.

* “Los Anthropolocos: New Digs at Mission Viejo--In Search of the Colorless Hands,” an installation by Richard Lou and Robert Sanchez, runs through Thursday at Saddleback College Art Gallery, 28000 Marguerite Parkway, Mission Viejo. Noon to 5 p.m. and 6 to 8 p.m. Monday; 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Thursday. Free. (714) 582-4924.