Surprises--much less pleasant surprises--are not what you expect from Sol LeWitt. For more than 35 years, he has adhered to the Conceptual art mandate he himself laid out in 1967, to make work that is "mentally interesting" and "emotionally dry." Yet surprisingly, and pleasantly, LeWitt's insistently logical work has begun to assume an emotional charge. In tandem shows at Regen Projects and Margo Leavin Gallery, LeWitt defies the tone of austere order that he championed decades ago. At Regen he turns aggressive; at Leavin, lyrical.
Established and familiar, LeWitt's work helped define the parameters of Minimalism through its modularity, seriality and unrelenting geometry--and cerebrally oriented Conceptualism. His wall drawings, which he has made since the late 1960s, consist of a set of instructions, procedures whose execution is left to others. "The idea," LeWitt has said, "becomes a machine that makes the art."
Stating its own case so plainly, LeWitt's work would seem to leave little to wrestle with, yet here he surprises. His sculpture at Regen Projects confronts all comers with a taunt, a dare. Just inside the gallery doors stands a concrete block wall, not quite denying entry, but certainly not encouraging it. LeWitt's wall, in monolithic industrial gray, stands more than 10 feet high and runs the 34-foot length of the gallery, undulating in a series of asymmetrical setbacks. It stands so close to the front wall in places that to walk its length you must turn sideways twice.
Concrete block is the perfect impersonal module for LeWitt, and he has been using it since at least the mid-1980s. Most of the sculptures he's made using it are benign variants on geometric forms: cubes, notched cubes, stepped pyramids, columns and the like. What makes the sculpture at Regen Projects so different is the way it claustrophobically commands the space, refusing access even to all sides of itself. The knowability so typical of LeWitt's work is aggressively withheld here, making for a startling, disarming encounter.
At Margo Leavin, LeWitt fills two rooms with new wall drawings--geometric diagrams in intense primary and secondary colors. However large, bold and illusionistic, they read nevertheless as variants on what we already know. A good, compact selection of sculptures is also on view, one of the "Serial Structure" floor pieces from 1978-79 and an origami-like "Complex Form" from 1989.
What intrigues here are the recent "Irregular Curves" paintings in gouache on paper, more than a dozen calligraphic pages of wavy lines. Painted in lush color combinations (maroon on aqua, gray on searing yellow, olive on blood, yellow ocher on royal blue), these gentle images are repetitive in overall format but never tiresome or dry. The loose weave of the lines gives the impression of a floating net, billowing in dreamy slow motion. The lines answer to a natural rhythm, the pace of the breath and the flowing stroke of the arm. Their order is based in the body, not in the abstractions of geometry.
These paintings conjure terms that LeWitt's earlier works repel. They are lyrical, forgiving, lush. Poetry here supplants formula, intuition overcomes logic, the sensuous envelopes the austere. The "Irregular Curves" series delivers, especially to those bothered by the distance between LeWitt's hand and the art attributed to him, an exhilarating rush of authenticity.
Regen Projects, 629 N. Almont Drive, L.A., (310) 276-5424, through Oct. 19. Margo Leavin Gallery, 812 N. Robertson Blvd., L.A., (310) 273-0603, through Oct. 27. Both galleries closed Sundays and Mondays.
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The Vast Earth: The earthly elements, in themselves and as subject matter for artists, are inexhaustible. Gillian Theobald has been painting earth, air, water and fire in distilled forms for more than 15 years, and she continues to sustain in her work a profound sense of vastness. Her newest paintings, at Cirrus Gallery, are as soul-satisfying as they are simply beautiful.
Theobald's paintings are accessible as landscapes, each canvas bearing silhouettes of trees, the suggestion of a lake or riverscape. But geography seems less and less important to her as the years go by. These paintings are views beyond the land. They expand upon the given through intensification of color and subtlety of form, so that one can easily lose oneself within them--not so much in the imagined physical space of the landscape as in the rarefied zone of contemplation they evoke.
