ART REVIEWS : Intimate Visions Outside the Mainstream

Three rarely seen series of vintage silver prints from the ‘60s, by renowned documentary photographer Danny Lyon, offer some intimate visions of lives far outside the American mainstream. While two groups of his black-and-white photographs at Jan Kesner Gallery live up to Lyon’s reputation for creating arresting images of individuals who belong to groups marginalized by society, his third series reveals something never before seen, to this degree, in his impressive oeuvre.

Lyon’s 1967 pictures of African-American transvestites in Galveston, Tex., are among the most beautiful and moving works he has made. In them, the New York-based artist moves beyond his usual compassionate portrayal of members of alienated subgroups to more fully realize, define and articulate the presence of two distinct individuals.

Unlike his other photographic essays, which are best known for their unflinching, unsentimental and dignified depiction of imprisoned criminals, outlaw bikers and children living in unconscionable poverty, Lyon’s Galveston series glimpses some joyousness in an otherwise dauntingly grim world, one overrun with injustice, bigotry and oppression. These works anticipate, by almost 25 years, Jennie Livingston’s film, “Paris Is Burning,” another overwhelmingly empowering celebration of a subculture within a subculture--African-American drag queens, flamboyant dancers and other irrepressible creatures-of-the-night.

After serving as the staff photographer for the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee in Atlanta, dropping out of the Art Institute of Chicago, and riding around the Midwest for two years with a motorcycle gang, Lyon traveled to Galveston where he met Roberta and Renee among other gay male teen-agers and prostitutes who regularly dressed up like women. He hung out with them and their friends for a week, drinking orange soda, smoking cigarettes, sharing conversation and making photographs.

The resulting images amount to Lyon’s most sustained study of two unique people. These casually stunning photographs have the candor and passion of all his work, but are different because in them he relaxes a tendency to use his art as an instrument for making powerful moral statements and social critiques.

Although this documentary impulse is not wholly absent from his Galveston series, its temporary subordination allows Lyon’s art an unparalleled personal richness and profound sense of intimacy.

Jan Kesner Gallery, 164 N. La Brea Ave., (213) 938-6834, through July 18. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Complex Meditations: Perry Araeipour’s extremely simple black or white paintings are actually complex meditations on the mind’s capacity to hold fleeting, fragmented perceptions together in coherent patterns. Each of the young, L.A.-based painter’s precisely calibrated canvases at Kiyo Higashi Gallery is an exceptionally focused exploration of the relationships between parts and wholes, autonomous objects and ongoing processes.

Since 1988, when Araeipour began exhibiting his mature abstractions, he has continuously pared down his vocabulary, eliminating subtle variations in color, extraneous panels and complicated compositions. His reductivism has not resulted in a hermetic art that endlessly reflects upon its inherent formal qualities, but a refreshingly open body of work whose slight formal modifications engender endlessly intriguing modulations in experience.

A single painting by Araeipour consists of two horizontal, monochromatic rectangles whose exterior edges define a perfect, if truncated square. The gallery’s blank walls literally enter his pictures.

In the space between the images, Araeipour allows the wall’s emptiness to transgress the boundaries an ordinary painting would establish. He transforms the apparent neutrality of the gallery’s architecture into an aggressive pictorial element, one that upsets entrenched oppositions between a singular object and its surrounding context.

By making paintings that border on being more reticent and self-effacing than the walls upon which they hang, the Minimalist-inspired artist reverses normal relationships between presence and absence. The conventional division between passive contemplation and active engagement is also subverted by his quietly resolved studies of the uncertain territory where sensory perception and intellectual cognition sometimes come into contact, but are often mismatched.

The physical aspects of thinking take shape in Araeipour’s understated art as the larger panel of each of his paintings contains an illusionistic--but slightly diminished--echo of its smaller counterpart. These rectangles within rectangles cause his paintings to function both as frames for themselves and as doubles of themselves.

In the same way that original thinking blurs the distinctions between cause and effect, stimuli and responses, Araeipour’s images both expand and contract, sometimes floating beyond their material simplicity and at others folding back upon their neat forms. By shifting between being completed wholes and unfinished components of larger arrangements, they physically act out the way thought is experienced--as both absolutely autonomous yet totally contingent upon seemingly insignificant details.

Kiyo Higashi Gallery, 8332 Melrose Blvd., (213) 655-2482, through July 11. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

An Epic Battle: Carole Caroompas’ four gigantic paintings at Sue Spaid Fine Art tell a tale of absurdity and horror, humor and mutation. Theirs is the story of an epic battle between nature and culture, in which artifice and biology cross paths with deadly unpredictability. Theirs is also the story of growing up, of figuring out how to fit in and stand out in a world whose established roles alternate between being comfortably ordinary and frighteningly alien.

Collectively titled “Before and After Frankenstein: The Woman Who Knew Too Much,” Caroompas’ paintings use Mary Shelley’s tragic 19th-Century novel as a point of reference for their own dissection of contemporary sexual stereotypes. Unlike much socially oriented, feminist-inspired art, Caroompas’ refrains from pointing a finger at the culprits (men) who have, almost single-handedly, messed up the world. Instead of assigning blame, her paintings attempt to picture a world in which things might be different, if still twisted.

The exhibition’s largest painting, “The Bad Seed,” depicts a fully uniformed, upside-down football player spilling forth from between the legs of a woman who lies on a hospital bed as a nurse prepares an abortion unit. In the background, eight snakes eat their tails, and a diagramed family-tree shows the pretty, indistinguishable children a man had with his wife and the more interesting, ugly kids who were the offspring of his mistress. A glistening iceberg and a jar containing the dysfunctional brain from Frankenstein’s creation complete Caroompas’ aggressive yet sympathetic image of new beginnings, rejected options and strange repetitions.

If Shelley’s creepy novel describes how a mad scientist’s desire to play God runs amok when his “project” doesn’t live up to his dreams, Caroompas’ paintings begin to pick up the pieces of this shattered fantasy. Combining portraits of nuclear physicists, anatomical models, cartoon characters and illustrations from manuals on children’s psychological development, her realistic images renounce the absolute control Dr. Frankenstein sought in favor of less egocentric aspirations.

By giving up the illusion of trying to make something absolutely original, Caroompas’ painted collages stitch together the possibility of renewal. Her new series, of which these four paintings are the first installment, promises to recycle myths with a twist, with a willingness to accept the mutations that result when nature and culture commingle.

Sue Spaid Fine Art, 7454 1/2 Beverly Blvd., (213) 935-6153, through July 26. Closed Mondays and Tuesdays.

Manipulation: Dick Arentz’s astonishingly crisp landscape photographs at Stephen Cohen Gallery are remarkable because they’re made with a restored, large-format “banquet” camera from the 1920s. They’re also intriguing because of the Arizona-based artist’s capacity to manipulate the antique process to create images in which solid objects appear liquid and material substances seem to dissolve into fields of pure light.

Part of this effect is due to the fact the Arentz’s negatives are the same size as his prints, 12x20 inches. Without having to rely on enlargements, his photographs maintain the precision and clarity of the original negatives.

Arentz’s most mesmerizing photographs are those in which he focuses on natural vistas whose innumerable contours and details do not blur as they recede in the distance, but remain as clear and distinct as those in the foreground. In a photograph of a canyon in Yellowstone National Park, the patterns of erosion in the rocks make the earth look more fluid than the river that bisects the picture.

When the 57-year-old photographer combines his trademark sharpness of detail with mirror-like surfaces of still water, reflected trees and brilliant sunlight glaring between innumerable branches and uncountable leaves, he transforms nature’s matter-of-fact tangibility into an almost hallucinatory world of elusive beauty.

Stephen Cohen Gallery, 7466 Beverly Blvd., (213) 937-5525, through July 4. Closed Sunday through Tuesday.