Hashimoto Fashions Air, Light and Space

Jacob Hashimoto’s two installations in the project room at Patricia Faure Gallery are literally breathtaking--and, in a marvelous way, breath-giving. A deep intake of air upon entering the gallery is not just requisite but immediate and involuntary, for Hashimoto’s work doesn’t just occupy the space, it aerates it. The buoyancy and lightness of the work seem to fill the lungs and most refreshingly vitalize the spirit.

In his stunning introductory show here in late 1998, the young L.A.-based artist created a room-sized cascading canopy of small kites. This time, Hashimoto presents two separate installations that complement each other and resonate with the same invigorating beauty of that first offering.

“Crunch” nestles into one corner, a 16-foot-high column of red paper rectangles, mounted like kites on slim bamboo rods and suspended in staggered vertical rows with indigo string. An evanescent, subtly shifting, three-dimensional mosaic, the piece is as ravishing as it is simple and reductive.

For “Moon Pie,” Hashimoto again fashions small kites from paper and bamboo rods, but hangs them in a cascading, receding wedge, so that the rows are widest and highest toward the center of the gallery, then they drop and recede until they reach the room’s back corner. From the front, the slightly fluttering wall of lunar white shapes (hexagons and their complement, angular hourglasses) suggests a rising wave of butterflies or hovering, shimmering petals or the transient spectacle of dappled light itself. Seen from the narrow perimeter between the installation and the back wall, the strings holding the shapes dominate, and the emphasis of the piece shifts from music to its mechanism. Both are astonishingly elegant.

Hashimoto’s work has the evanescent presence of a mirage, and yet its process and materiality are substantial. The pieces embody the meditative rhythm of repetitive handwork, the tying and knotting involved in their making. For all of their exquisite lightness and ethereality, they are sculptures and Hashimoto a sculptor--of air, light, and space.

* Patricia Faure Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 449-1479, through July 8. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Outside In: True art, Jean Dubuffet once wrote, “is allergic to the air of collective approval.” It surfaces in unexpected places, takes unlikely forms and should flee in haste if recognition comes its way.

Why, then, did Dubuffet help turn heads in the direction of what he termed art brut--pure, unschooled art from the hands of the mentally ill and others untainted by high culture? Outsider art, as it’s more widely known, has become increasingly visible and popular in the mainstream art world, as abundant publications, exhibitions and an enthusiastic market attest. In other words, it’s been brought inside.

“L’Art Brut: Jean Dubuffet and the Outsiders,” at Louis Stern Fine Arts, presents a lively sampling by 10 European artists (plus Dubuffet himself), nonconformers all. To Dubuffet, art brut bypassed the intellect and the mediating influence of social convention and plunged straight into the pungent depths of the unconscious. The densely packed and patterned images on view here testify to the fertility of that gray area, variably identified as lucidity or madness.

Ornamental overload is common among the paintings and drawings, as is an unconstrained inventiveness that has immediate visceral appeal. Adolf Wolfli’s striated universes are the most familiar of the visions here, but others are equally engaging: Anna Zemankova’s odd, exuberant plant forms, for instance, and Augustin Lesage’s multitiered, filigreed framing of Egyptian figures. Urgency and vibrancy are in long supply among these artists, who create, many according to their own descriptions, out of the need to exorcise demons and communicate with unseen spirits.

What first sparked Dubuffet’s interest in the emotional authenticity of art by outsiders was a 1922 book of images by psychiatric patients, assembled by the German art historian and psychiatrist Hans Prinzhorn. Selections from Prinzhorn’s influential collection go on view Sunday at the UCLA/Hammer Museum, in what should be an expansive exploration of some of the same compelling issues raised here.

* Louis Stern Fine Arts, 9002 Melrose Ave., (310) 276-0147, through July 22. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

First Impressions: Penelope Krebs’ paintings at Kiyo Higashi Gallery manage to reconcile polar opposites. They’re minimal in form but emit maximal visual buzz.

Her new work, like her old, follows a strictly regimented order. The canvases are all square (about 1 to 2 feet per side) and striped with vertical bars of equal widths and radically different colors. They do for the eye what candy does for the tongue--shock it with a burst of intensity, which either persists with cloying sameness or gradually reveals subtler undercurrents. Some of Krebs’ paintings go one way, some the other, depending on the mix of colors she employs.

Opaque, highly saturated and applied with mechanical evenness, the colors range far and wide within each canvas. In one (all of the paintings are untitled), the progression moves, left to right, from steel gray to pumpkin, through acid yellow, violet, periwinkle, brick, grape, royal blue, chalky pink and olive to aqua. Quite a journey, but the destination is no more than a retinal logjam.

Another painting--one of three that have slender same-color bands in between the wider ones--has boldly divergent colors at either end, but a narrower range in the middle. The effects are ravishing.

Krebs skips rhetorical flourishes and lets her colors speak for themselves, individually and in concert. When the combination of voices, flavors and intensities work, nuances emerge beyond the spectacle of the first impression. Otherwise, that first impression--of a dazzling formula--is the one that stays.

* Kiyo Higashi Gallery, 8332 Melrose Ave., (323) 655-2482, through July 15. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Echoes of War: Playful, clunky and vaguely daunting, Dean De Cocker’s new sculptures at Hunsaker/Schlesinger Gallery touch plenty of associational bases. What they don’t do consistently is congeal into compelling visual form.

Using canvas, fiberglass, wood, nylon and vinyl, De Cocker riffs on the shapes of airplane parts, mailboxes and heavy machinery, mounting his sculptures just off the wall with painted, architectonic metal brackets. He’s titled this show “Fragments From the Pacific” and used military allusions and World War II battle references to name individual works. His interest, he has stated, is in the construction techniques of World War II aircraft, but the militaristic references also lend themselves to narrative readings of the sculpture.

“Yorktown,” the only free-standing work in the show, suggests a death march, or perhaps the dropping of bombs. On a low wood table, De Cocker has assembled a cluster of small, standing, translucent white forms. They seem to be progressing toward a cutout opening in the table. On the floor beneath the opening lie several more such forms on their sides, inert in corroded gray metal. With or without a literal reading, “Yorktown” has a presence and poignancy that few other works here can claim.

The twin-lobed, propeller-like shape that invites comparison to the human form in “Yorktown” does so again in “The Pacific Boils Over,” where a large pair of them, upholstered in canvas, snuggle close to each other with cartoonish affection. Elsewhere the form repeats in long, lobular chains suggesting microorganisms.

De Cocker puts his industrial-strength vocabulary to oddly disjunctive ends here, in his sculptures and in a series of 1997 lithographic prints pairing photographs of airport hangars and airplane fragments with such fragmentary terms as “Dark Pocket/False Cross,” and “Iron Bottom Sound.” The results are less than synergistic.

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Hunsaker/Schlesinger Fine Art, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 828-1133, through June 30. Closed Sundays and Mondays.