ART REVIEWS : ‘Americas’ Puts Lyon Into Sharper Focus

Danny Lyon is a documentary photographer and filmmaker who packs rough-and-tumble images with sensitivity and compassion. His most well-known works from the 1960s offer stirring insights into the complicated lives of motorcycle gang members, prisoners and transvestites.

At Jan Kesner Gallery, nearly 50 photos shot on the artist’s many trips to Colombia, Mexico, Bolivia, Haiti and Belize have been brought together to form a panoramic survey, whose emotional sweep is more far-reaching and inclusive than any of Lyon’s single series.

Titled “Americas,” this selection of images from 1965 to 1994 paints a multifaceted picture of ordinary men, women and children at work, rest and play, alone or in groups, on crowded city streets and along empty country roads. Dramatic, once-in-a-lifetime experiences, including explosive standoffs with gun-wielding authorities, coexist with everyday activities like washing clothes, tilling fields, flying kites and conversing with friends.

This moving exhibition also offers a substantial overview of Lyon’s development as an artist, outlining the steady, year-by-year evolution of his commitments and priorities. Over three decades the photographer appears to have grown increasingly familiar, even intimate, with the people in his pictures. Concurrently, his style has shifted from intense portraits loaded with metaphoric import to a poignant exploration of the commonplace.

Lyon’s earliest prints, in black-and-white and color, are close-ups of women and abandoned children. While many of these charged images have the impact of his mature works, others feel forced and manipulative, as if the newly arrived visitor was still too caught up in his expectations and prejudices to treat his subjects as individuals.

By contrast, the people depicted in Lyon’s most recent photos rarely seem to be mere examples or types. These intentionally casual images, printed from Polaroid negatives, have the unself-conscious ease of the prosaic. They form a remarkably engaging body of work that is exceptional in its capacity to be ordinary without being cliched. Their realism is never easy or unartistic, but always powerful.

* Jan Kesner Gallery, 164 N. La Brea Ave., (213) 938-6834, through Feb. 25. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Slippery Images: In Edward Ruscha’s three new prints at Remba Gallery, things are just what they seem to be. They’re also a whole lot more complicated than they appear at first glance.

The trouble with discussing the deep meanings of this L.A.-based artist’s slippery images is that you come off sounding insincere and pretentious, like some overeager nerd obsessed with reading your own ideas into his honest depictions of regular things.

Ruscha’s three seemingly straightforward prints consist of an image, some numbers or a couple of letters, all floating in a hazy, gray field behind some strands of three-dimensional wheat grass. You could say that these works explore some of the ways meaning is conveyed--pictorially, quantitatively and linguistically.

Or, you could say that they’re just plain images of a hunting dog’s silhouette, the four numbers on the faces of many clocks and the word US , all caught between the picture plane and the Great Plains of the western United States. Then again, these prints have something to say about timelessness, abstraction and the attempt to hunt out and retrieve meaning.

Trying to say why Ruscha’s pictures are so seductive and compelling makes you sound like someone who believes that the narratives found in Literature, are more significant than the ordinary stories that make up regular life. It is precisely this sort of overblown aggrandizement that his pictures call for and then slyly undercut.

Almost all of Ruscha’s work is a testament to the resonance of the everyday. With his impossible-to-pin-down art, the literary and the literal cancel each other out, leaving a lot of space in which both echo, long after you’ve stopped looking.

* Remba Gallery, 424 N. Robertson Blvd., West Hollywood, (310) 657-1101, through Feb. 25. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Deep Reflection: At Bobbie Greenfield Gallery, Jasper Johns’ prints from the last five years form a dense, self-referential world that never feels claustrophobic, despite its repetitive, hall-of-mirrors quality.

At the same time, his lithographs and etchings (like his recent paintings) rarely feel playful, despite being made up of a plethora of conceptual games, logical puzzles and illusionistic conundrums. At stake in Johns’ masterfully mysterious art is a thought-provoking, often melancholic meditation on how an artist’s work and his identity shape one another.

Questions, rather than answers, are his preferred modus operandi . You get the sense that Johns recycles images and symbols he has used for the past 40 years because their significance continues to elude him, haunting the present like a ghost from the past.

A compendium of art-historical influences, including references to Holbein, Van Gogh, Picasso and Barnett Newman, provides ample evidence of how Johns sees himself professionally. The personal side of his quasi-autobiographical work is another matter altogether. Muteness, silence and guarded privacy define the persona that has emerged from Johns’ art over the years.

The newest lithograph in the exhibition is all the more remarkable, given this history of stubborn self-effacement. In the print, a photographic image of the artist’s father, as a little boy sitting in his own father’s lap, appears in the upper right corner.

While the family portrait initially seems to signal a more direct and revelatory phase in Johns’ art, it actually functions much like the other seemingly personal symbols in his work, obscuring as much as it exposes. The reproduced photograph presents facts but discloses no emotions, providing Johns with another element to reflect upon, without giving himself away.

* Bobbie Greenfield Gallery, 74 Market St., Venice, (310) 392-1771, through Feb. 28. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Haunting Presence: Michael Kenna’s jewel-like photographs at Craig Krull Gallery seem to be made for you alone. Their intimate scale requires that they be seen by one person at a time.

People never populate the lanes, parks, factories and castles that make up the man-made landscapes in the British-born, San Francisco-based artist’s romantic silver prints. In many images, the ground dissolves into an atmospheric mist. Brick bridges appear to float above clouds.

A road in the fog-shrouded French countryside leads down a hill and through some trees before it vanishes into nothingness. A rower in Prague is transformed into a fleeting blur on an ethereal river.

At the same time, the air and the light that move through it take on a nearly palpable density. In Kenna’s haunting pictures, these intangible substances possess the solidity of sculpture. His long exposures, often taken at night, transform nuclear cooling towers into mysterious totems, as if these mammoth structures were the modern equivalents of Stonehenge.

A series shot at the steel mills Charles Sheeler painted in the 1930s builds upon the Precisionist painter’s sense that the factories have been purged of a human presence. Like a modern alchemist, Kenna turns the world upside-down, transforming ordinary scenes into poignant vistas suffused with an exquisite sense of desolation.

* Craig Krull Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 828-6410, through Feb. 25. Closed Sundays and Mondays.