Llyn Foulkes just keeps scraping away. For more than 45 years, he's been roughing up whatever comfort can be mustered by home, health and material satisfaction. He aspires to keep things raw -- raw emotions, raw surfaces. They're more vulnerable that way, and more real, the abraded surfaces metaphors and consequences of degraded values.
Recent paintings and assemblages at Craig Krull Gallery testify to the enduring, unsettling power of Foulkes' vision. One additional, stunning piece by the artist hangs down the row at Patricia Faure Gallery. The nearly two dozen smaller works at Craig Krull build to a pitch of anxious urgency. The images emerge from a culture damaged and bereft, crowded by the false shelters of popular entertainment, blind faith, industrialized war and rampant consumerism.
Foulkes packs his work with personal, cultural and historical references, charging it with a density and weight uncommon these days in galleries given over to the slight gesture and clever one-liner. The self-portrait, "Dali and Me," is exemplary, a tight bundle of the grotesque, epic and comic. Foulkes has adopted a conventional bust portrait format only to interrupt, distort, subvert and violate it, all to serve the portrait's chief function: revealing character and identity.
A photographic fragment of Salvador Dali's eye and trademark mustache stands in for part of Foulkes' face. A cartoon sketch fills in more. The mouth is a murky, gaping cave gouged out of the painting's surface and stuck with a few huge teeth and a wooden flap for a tongue.
The expression is part guffaw, part existential Francis Bacon scream. The artist's combed-back hair shifts in consistency from viscous paint to crusty strands of the real thing. A simple piece compared with Foulkes' more elaborate reliefs, the portrait nevertheless throbs with intensity.
Familiar Foulkes motifs recur throughout: the rugged landscape replicated in splintered wood; the face, with features blotted out by blood-red smudges. Disaffection is the prevailing mood, grit the predominant texture. The temperament of Foulkes' work, its clawing at the unsightly underbelly of American pop culture, ought never to go out of favor. It keeps us alert. Artists emerging now tend to strategically buy in rather than conscientiously opt out, as so many of Foulkes' peers in the 1960s and '70s did in their quest for authenticity.
Another figure from that generation, Robert Dean Stockwell, is paired with Foulkes at Craig Krull and represented by a selection of recent prints, collages and assemblages. Most don't match the visceral potency of Foulkes' work.
The inkjet prints are dreadful and the crosses constructed of colored dice are quickly tiresome. But the collages pieced together from magazine pages can pulse with wonder and dismay.
Images in the grid segments of "Statue of Limitations" riff poignantly on violence and trauma. One shows a hand buried in rubble, another a crowd at a lynching. A Renaissance sculpture of David holding the head of Goliath bridges the two and offsets the blunter scenes with an aestheticized version of battle. The rest of the collage works like a fugue, reintroducing the themes of conflict and splendor.
Foulkes and Stockwell were included in last fall's "Semina Culture: Wallace Berman & His Circle" exhibition at the Santa Monica Museum of Art, a meaty survey of a community of artists earnest and resourceful, whose embrace of the worn and discarded was as passionate as its rejection of the seductive sheen of the postwar commercial mainstream. These shows makes a worthy postscript.
Craig Krull Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 828-6410, through Wednesday.
Patricia Faure Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 449-1479, through Nov. 25. Closed Sundays and Mondays.
Games of dress-up: To what purpose?
Heather Cantrell's staged photographic tableaux at sixspace are the graduate art school equivalent of kids dressing up and putting on a show in the clubhouse. The production looks fun and involving from the inside; less so from where we get to see it in stills on the wall.
Self-consciousness and self-referentiality mark this work as something beyond child's play, but Cantrell doesn't take the enterprise far enough. The images are quirky, but not enough to make them fascinating. They are mildly humorous, but hardly sparkle with ingenuity.
In most of the pictures, friends of the artists pose in costume before a weathered dropcloth. Some of the dress and props and certainly the vignetting of the images give the pictures a faux 19th century feel; but Cantrell is no Oscar Rejlander or Julia Margaret Cameron. She flaunts the artifice at work -- letting the backdrop's edges show, showing how close to the ground the tightrope is stretched, mixing real guns with flat cutouts in a mock duel -- but friction between the real and represented never fully develops.
