Platt Gallery Show Adds a Personal Touch

To say that the current show at the Platt Gallery is art that concerns itself with art is only partially right. What Sylvia Shap and Rena Small bring to their work is a distinctive, but peripheral interest in the forces of art. Fittingly, each has made a deft detour around the obvious, bringing a personal touch to imagery about the art scene.

For Small, the focus is on the hands of artists, which she has been photographing for a dozen years, and which she has stitched together in dense, tapestry-like patterns on the walls. She gets to the crux of art-making, while avoiding obvious face recognition.

By contrast, Shap’s amiable brand of portraiture concerns art’s support system--those personalities not readily identified. As a portraitist, she flatters the people who hover around artists--critics, curators, art tour leaders, consultants, collectors--with her subjects placed asymmetrically against pale, neutral backgrounds.

We do find celebrities here, of sorts, viewed in different ways. Venerable Time magazine art critic Robert Hughes, who several years ago hosted the PBS series “Shock of the New,” is depicted circa 1981, casting a knowing gaze while looking casual and self-assured.

Former Los Angeles Contemporary Museum of Art curator Maurice Tuchman, on the other hand, looks both hip and prim, tight-lipped and bound up in a forest green jacket and yellow tie. Famous art collector couples, the Nortons (software mogul Peter and wife) and the Wilders (famed director Billy and wife), are placed against thick red backdrops.

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Shap affectionately renders other subjects who have art connections, including the Los Angeles Times’ own art writer Suzanne Muchnic.

The most striking portrait on view is the least typical. Whereas the others pose in a self-conscious way, the subject of “Woman With Heart Surgery Scar” conveys an intensity, the weathered look of a survivor. We see only a glimpse of the scar on her chest, but in this piece there is a dramatic subtext and a bracing candor otherwise missing in other works.

It may boil down to a matter of aesthetic perspective. Should portraits necessarily flatter their subjects, or should they scrape beneath manicured surfaces and postures, revealing a more essential, warts (and scars) and all expression of personality? That’s the relevant question here.

Small’s photographic portraiture is of another ilk. Starting in 1984, she began photographing the hands of artists, and has amassed a huge, stellar collection of images. In the gallery, photographs have been assembled into large quilts, creating a wall of hands.

This blanketing visual effect enhances one aspect of Small’s project, as she cleverly blurs individual identities and the cult of personality often associated with the art world. In viewing these celebrated hands, we think less about the self-defined mythologies of artists like Andy Warhol, Sam Francis, Robert Longo, Roy Lichtenstein, and all, and recognize more the common humanity behind their work.

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There are stories told in the way some artists present their hands. Laura Whipple’s hold a giant sculpted hand, while Chris Burden’s hand holds a tiny toy truck. Wayne Thiebaud gestures with his hands, like an opera singer or an orator. Chuck Close has one broken hand, while Jean Michel Basquiat has one thumb wrapped in black fabric.

Alexis Smith’s hands are calmly folded, but with a giant watch face on her wrist disarming our sense of logic.

Most often, Small shoots hands surrounded by black fabric, a tactic which accentuates the graceful and rugged contours of the hands in question and further removes them from their respective owners.

In general, Small gives us a carefully conceived, democratic view of creative handiwork. Art may come into being through imaginary, seemingly magical sources, but human hands such as these are at the root of it all.

DETAILS

* WHAT: “Images of the Art World,” Sylvia Shap and Rena Small.

* WHEN: Through Feb. 23. Gallery hours: 10 a.m.-4 p.m., Sunday-Thursday, 10 a.m.-2 p.m. Friday.

* WHERE: Platt Gallery, University of Judaism, 15600 Mulholland Drive, Los Angeles.

* CALL: (310) 476-9777, Ext. 203.