Throughout a Versatile Career, a Continuing Light Motif

Whether sculpture, wall relief, painting or drawing, Peter Alexander’s has always been an art whose hinge is transparent color. In the 30-year survey of his work now at the Orange County Museum of Art, the wide variety of mediums on view belies a remarkable singularity of purpose.

“Peter Alexander: In This Light” brings together 59 works. It begins with a 10-inch cube cast from polyester resin that the artist made in 1966, his final year of graduate school at UCLA. It ends with a delicate painting on silk, made last year.

The resin cube, titled “Cloud Box,” is like a frozen piece of honey-gold sky, its transparent interior inflected with cumulus-style “clouds” made from puffs of water vapor trapped inside. The painting on silk shows an aerial view of an urban street grid at dusk, as if seen from an airplane coming in for a landing, the blue-black sky interrupted by a searing yellow-orange cloud of color.

In between are a broad range of works, which, on first glance, might seem to constitute a carefully selected group show by several artists with a certain affinity, rather than the singular production of just one. Among the array are:

* Wedges and pyramids of cast resin in single colors, either small and pedestal-bound or tall and standing on the floor, their tapering shapes giving the effect of the translucence of ocean water that goes from clear near the surface to darkly impenetrable in the depths.

* Tall, narrow, convex resin bars, all in one hue and hung in rows of five or six against the wall, which visually seems to go soft and spongy between them.

* Lush pastel drawings and paintings made with oil and wax, depicting the dramatic pyrotechnics of sunset over the Pacific.

* Easel paintings made with glitter on stretched velvet, showing celestial configurations like the aurora borealis exploding in zigzag patterns over low horizons.

* Big, painted, unstretched wall hangings, also made of plush black velvet, onto which have been stitched bits of polka-dotted fabric, sequins, tufts of tulle and decorative trim, whose organic shapes and composition suggest undersea phantasmagoria like anemones, jellyfish and eels.

* Paintings of jungle interiors, backlit by the moon.

* Exquisite drawings of a sleeping black cat, made with soft, light-absorbent pastel on plain white paper (they’re positively Chinese in bearing).

* Airplane views of the city at night, the acrylic, oil or pastel marks of street lamps verging on total abstraction as they merge with atmospheric haze.

* Paintings of artificially illuminated reproductions of classical sculptures on the Las Vegas Strip.

* Images of palm trees, usually up-lit at night to emphasize the human interventions of horticulture and design over nature.

In each body of work, light is critical. Los Angeles is known as home to the unique art called Light and Space, but usually that name is applied to environmental installations by the likes of Robert Irwin or Maria Nordman. In reality, though, the aesthetics of Light and Space have been critical to artists of very different means, from the geometric abstractions of painter John McLaughlin (between the 1950s and the 1970s) to that of John M. Miller (between the 1970s and the present), and on to the very different work of young artists today, like painter Kevin Appel and video artist Jennifer Steinkamp.

Alexander helped originate what I think of as the Pop wing of Light and Space art. Whether in his choice of materials, like plastic, glitter and velvet, or of images, like cats, palm trees and sunsets--that staple of Hallmark greeting card romance--he’s sought to redeem the culturally demeaned through a rigorous artistic sensibility. Light has been the transaction’s agent.

Light looks different in the 20th century than it ever did before, thanks to electricity and cameras. Alexander’s art almost always turns on the strange, seductive intersection between artificiality and nature. Today the idea of an inescapable mediation between technology and nature is regularly touted as cutting-edge, but Alexander’s been at it since the 1960s. A “little master” of the genre, he’s approached it from a dozen different angles.

This singularity of purpose amid a diversity of means has guided the presentation at the Orange County Museum. The exhibition, whose guest curator is Las Vegas-based art critic Dave Hickey and whose installation designer is L.A.-based painter Billy Al Bengston, is not laid out in the usual chronological manner. Indeed, the 1966 “Cloud Box” doesn’t turn up until the final room.

Instead, the rooms are organized as theater. Rather than an abstract intellectual principle like chronology, the show is ordered experientially, to accentuate the sensuousness of pre-linguistic perception that is the actual through-line in Alexander’s artistic narrative. (For chronology turn to the catalog, where each work is reproduced sequentially in full color.) In this museum show-and-tell it’s the exhibition that shows and the catalog that tells.

The first room is a kind of retrospective in miniature. There’s a tall, elegant, cast-resin wedge and a six-bar resin wall relief; two easel paintings with glitter on velvet and one velvet hanging with “undersea” applique (titled “Gulper,” it’s Alexander’s masterpiece); and three works on paper, including an aerial view of Pacific Coast Highway at night. The time spanned is 1969 to 1988, and the continuity of artistic interest in transparent color is impossible to miss.

A wedge-shaped alcove adjacent features the luxurious black-cat pastels, hung on a wall painted Chinese red (the brightly lit color is so intense that it pervades the room’s atmosphere). The next room features another diverse array with some equally playful touches: a black-resin pyramid flooded with a shower of light from two spots directly overhead, and paintings of the up-lit fronds of palm trees hung high up on the wall, so you look at them the way you would actual up-lit palms out in a backyard, a parking lot or a restaurant patio.

Midway through the show, a furniture grouping suggests a stylish living room. Two Corbusier “Grand confort” chairs and a similar sofa are arranged around a sisal rug. A long Alexander triptych, a diptych and several other tropical paintings of moonlit jungles are hung very low on surrounding walls. The low height literally forces your body to shift from standing to sitting; in order to see the paintings well you readily sink down into the comfy chairs.

Le Corbusier’s 1928 design for the “Grand confort” chair performed a radical reversal: Rather than covering a frame with upholstery, he exposed the frame by making a basket of tubular steel filled with fat leather cushions. In the show, the sudden intercession of a mock living room inside the austere institutional space of a contemporary art museum attempts a similar reversal. An easy sociability among peers sitting around chatting about what they see replaces the more common museum hierarchy, where institutional authority tries to hide itself behind benign educational lessons.

Despite an occasional awkward moment in the installation design, its savvy theatricality revives the best of Pop tradition, all in the service of illuminating Alexander’s aesthetic. This is a satisfying retrospective for which there’s simply no business like show business.

* “Peter Alexander: In This Light,” Orange County Museum of Art, 850 San Clemente Drive, (949) 759-1122, through Sept. 12. Closed Mondays.