If Blum & Poe’s gallery one is thought of as the face of a clock, the first of Julian Hoeber’s nine acrylic varnish and sumi ink paintings, moving clockwise, would occur at 40 minutes past the hour. The final piece would be at 20 past. Cumulatively this suggests pictorial time that picks up near the middle and ends somewhat before the end, which thereby temporalizes our experience of the show as tenuous. Tenuous too is the Bridget Riley-like optical effect of each piece: a background of black concentric circles that at once float and hover both on the ground and above it.  The moment we enter the gallery, then, corralled by empty wall space at the beginning and the end of the four walls, we plop in amidst 20 minutes of unaccounted time.

Hoeber’s lost time recalls St. Augustine’s conflation of temporal and absolute time. Each piece (all 2008) puts you in mind of a CD designed by Roy Lichtenstein with its caricature sketchiness, its grooves, its implied and constant whirring (which echoes the drone of the overhead lights). Hoeber works with the perpetual and circular flow of time. His images refer to things that are ephemeral: the carnal, the banal, the witty.  He gives us a couple of Durer-esque nipples (Centered Tit, Toilet Breast); the physiognomy of a goofy, George Carlin-esque mug (Stupid Face); a kid’s drawing of a wedding; a reproduction of a Cézanne painting of two card players next to a sketch of the same piece which, when folded over, mirror each other (Cezanne Rorshach).  Bullet-shaped holes perforate the surface  ofFading Spiral with Holes), while a head centrifugally spins blood away from the center, to pool at the bottom  in Head with Drips.

The theme of absolute temporality resumes in gallery two, with 10 polished bronze skulls in various stages of utter destruction. One head looks as if it were blasted with a mortar shell (they’re all untitled), so the skull looks like a crenellated crown. One lacks the entire back of the head, the face pocked with shotgun pellets. With jaws, chins, bridges of noses, tops of heads, backs of heads, and eye sockets variously disfigured with gashes, entry and exit wounds  they look like soft boiled eggs, placed in a holder, covered with a cozy, and then mauled with a jackhammer. Intact (and intimate) neck folds constitute Bronze Age versions of the draped marble folds of the Winged Victory of Samothrace; negative space (of which there is much, including mouths and eye sockets) describes shadowed irregular shapes, the purity of the opposing white wall, the floor below.  The stainless steel pedestals reflect the viewer from the waist down as if to announce“You’re next!” as well as confirm the title of the show, “All that is solid melts into air.”

Collectively, these sculptures look like death masks cast from Aztec sacrifices. Each embodies the magical absurd-beyond-belief-because-it’s-so-true realism of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Along with the contents of the first gallery, they suggest a serially surreal Day of the Dead, laden with art historical references (Op Art, Pop Art, Cézanne, Abstract Expressionism).  They are a grand way to garner our attention to matters beyond our quotidian ken.

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July 11 to October 25, 2003

Hans Burkhardt responds to war with deep felt feelings of rage, horror, and disgust. Moreover, he expresses these feelings with a sure hand that takes us to the brink of annihilation and back. It’s an exhausting process because Burkhardt’s catharsis is our catharsis, his redemption, of himself, of mankind, is ours, too.

Born in 1904 in Basel, Switzerland, he moved to New York in 1924 and to Los Angeles in 1937. As he told Colin Gardner in a 1984 interview, he wasn’t especially political; his responses to war came from what he heard and read in the media. Hans Burkhardt died in 1994.

In 1940 he painted War, Agony in Death. Painted with gooey oil on a large canvas of 78 x 114 inches, illuminated by a throbbing, about-to-wane Aztec sun and constructed of wild and abrupt angles that catapult one into the pictorial space, the piece looks like some diabolical cyclotron has hurled everything against the surface of the picture plane. Eerily-prescient intimations of post-AbEx Philip Guston (cowled heads with slits for eyes that are more likely turret openings in tanks, but still…) and Francis Bacon (bloody, disembodied teeth) combine with a tank seen in profile, a bundle of crosses, forms that can be missiles or houses or people on some manner of Calvary in the middle ground to form a tableau of a world not going quietly into the good night. In fact, as crowded as the picture is, there is a startling empty space in the middle of the image that recedes from the foreground all the way back into a limitless horizon, like a mannerist painting by Pontormo, creating a vortex drawing all into and down some nauseous spiral.

He uses the same empty-center composition in 1954’s Bikini (Hydrogen Bomb), one of the more abstract paintings in this show. An incandescent light source shines from somewhere off in the recesses of the upper right corner. This light source melts the shapes and shimmers the surface. The result is neither an implosion nor an explosion but a centrifugal force that vaporizes solid form with cataclysmic fury and radiates outward. Whatever constitutes the red and orange sinews that claw the picture plane are pressed up against the pictorial plane from the implied depth of the picture against some imaginary window. Indeed, there exists the sense that something structural has been turned to mist, remnants of a center that will not hold, in Yeats’ oracular phrase.

Burkhardt’s paintings resonate with perpetual relevance. A non-combattant, he nonetheless produced metaphors .of an all-too-human institution that one way or another will continue to affect every single person on the planet. Forever.

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July 19 to August 23, 2003

In her eight large paintings on show at Patricia Correiea, Helene Slavin creates instant patina. Looking aged, well-used, as if they’ve been sitting in an attic, her works resemble maps that mischevious schoolchildren have dipped in coffee. Actually, they’re built up from layers of acrylic, encaustic, and oil applied via gesture, splash, and squiggle. They appear aged because Slavin drenches her canvases with mute color.

Colors are on the brink of strident, as if seen through a scrim. Fiery yellow skies, for example, in Evergreens; luminous white in the Vermeer-inspired View of Delft; the yellow-white of the sun or whatever light source it is that illuminates the female in Stephany. With subtly she tones down these colors. Their effect is not acerbic, as in German Expressionism, or incandescent, as in Van Gogh. Rather, the experience is of looking at a faded Gauguin Tahiti painting. Once-lustrous but no longer so, yet with intimations of past lustre.

Slavin works her surfaces to an extraordinary degree. Rather than staining the canvas like Helen Frankenthaler or Morris Louis, she literally soaks, saturates, tattoos the canvas. They look well-worked like a tapestry, pummeled to good effect. As well as the surface, she applies paint to the flip-side of the canvas where it emerges through the interstices of the linen. Moreover, she singes the surface to melt the wax. Finally, she sands and then varnishes the surface to preserve the poltergeist of the process. Think of a sunset over rubbled Pompeii preserved in ambergris.

Her strategy is at once expressionistic and conceptual. On one level, there is the sense of walking into a well-appointed Victorian reading room and finding a comfortable chair: Comfortable if not nostalgic. By dint of their size, they engulf the viewer. Sparse on detail and long on lyricism, they engage slowly, they simmer, occasionally they percolate. They induce calm, irrespective of subject matter. They are a cocksure paean to technique and virtuosity unmediated by posturing and theory.

By creating work that spans abstraction and figuration and is made with an identical technique, an identical look, an identical resonance, she abolishes historical hierarchies between abstraction and figuration. She renders moot the tension between figuration and abstraction, showing that they are two sides of the same coin, painting. Her work may flirt with abstraction but it does so the way Picasso’s and Braque’s did, where even their most abstract works of Analytical Cubism still maintained a purchase in representation, on tangible reality.

These works suggest the tension that animates painting today is anti-painting. The real distinction is between things that age and those that don’t. Installations, especially; performances; and also, a whole genre of work that escaped commodification, like Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, Schwitter’s Merzbau, Duchamp’s Fountain. Slavin’s work embodies meanings, to borrow the phrase from Arthur Danto who extended Marcel Duchamp’s conceit of retinal painting. Conceptually, the work poses an unintended homage to painting, to its endurance, its viability, the way the fact of its existence is the subtext behind every painting ever produced (just as every book printed bears some relation to each other).

As with decanted wine, time enhances the works; their implicit longevity, their duration-made-manifest, and their maturation, are in themselves part of their subject. That is painting’s saving grace. All the experiments of the 20th century that changed the nature of painting could not alter one incontrovertible fact: over time paintings (and bronze sculpture) age, they acquire a patina. And perhaps, just perhaps, this patina sustains any aura that was present at its conception. Does video age to good effect before it disintegrates? What about installations and performances, how do they stand the ravages of time?

Slavin’s work shows that one of painting’s perennial themes is the acknowledgement of its own aging. She doesn’t trumpet her genre’s will-to-aura; no, suave and discreet, her work shimmers like a smoggy Milton Avery, premature, old, getting better all the time.

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May 31 – June 28, 2003

Rodney McMillian’s work limns absence as an unmitigated presence. His take on absence is more sensuous than cerebral. He doesn’t deconstruct the idea of absence and then rebuild it as a dialectical opposition, positing that what’s notseen, felt, experienced is as significant, perhaps more so, as that which is. He waxes nostalgic, as Van Gogh does in his painting of the empty chair in which sat his chum Paul Gauguin when he dropped in for a visit to Arles. The subject of both McMillian’s show and this painting of Van Gogh is not our reaction to a void but our innate tendency to venerate the void itself as something sacred and iconic.

McMillian presents sensuous absences. “an audience”, 2003, (the titles aren’t capitalized) consists of a five minute continuous loop DVD which shows a panning camera that focuses on the various reactions of the audience for pop icon’s Michael Jackson’s 30th anniversary special. As befits an icon, everyone, including a bejeweled Elizabeth Taylor, waxes some state of rapture. The women gyrate and undulate (we’d hear them ululate, too, if the sound was turned up) like maenads in ecstatic transport. “chair” 2003, has a plain, lopsided, threadbare chair, sitting in a corner. It’s not much to look at, yet it has a particular sanctity of place, like an icon, a familiar location where it would be set, like Archie Bunker’s armchair from the television series “All in the Family” which has since been enshrined in the Smithsonian. As a repository and sum of formerposteriors that have dented its cushions, of previous elbows that have grazed the armrests, the chair offers not a weedy patina of desuetude but an apotheosis of its former occupant.

The show does not convene a séance of poltergeists. Rather, it describes our rush to fill a void of the real person. For whatever reason the viewer doesn’t have before them the flesh and blood Michael Jackson, the now-gone parent, friend, lover whose body formed the concavities of the chair. Instead of the respective platonic ideals or singular simulacrums of these people we have their residue. Face it, just as nature abhors a vacuum, so too can we not exist without mementos, lingering traces, if not autographs, then memories stored in our heart and keepsakes stored in our attic, of people we have known or else admired from afar. It’s human nature to revere, to gape and awe, discretely or not, a point that Rodney McMillian makes subtly and not without wry humor. His role is to remind us of our fascination with the aura of remnants. Auras harbor and replenish our hopes and fantasies, nourish our memories,allowing us to say, without remorse, that as long as we have proximity to something of substance of someone, then through a process of transubstantiation, we’ve got plenty of nothing and that nothing is plenty for us.

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