A Mixture of Elegance, Androgynous Strength

The 1996-97 art season has had more than its share of terrific solo debuts, and Kurt Kauper’s exhibition at ACME Gallery continues the trend. Four stunning paintings of life-size imaginary opera divas and two smaller portraits of Maria Callas on TV show the young artist to be as skilled with a brush as he is smart about art’s unnatural powers.

Each of Kauper’s four large panels measures nearly 7 by 4 feet and depicts a single diva standing before a monochromatic backdrop. Each is bedecked in an elegant satin dress and adorned with a well-selected piece of jewelry. The imaginary prima donnas are so self-possessed that their mere presence stops you in your tracks, all the better to stare at their silent splendor.

One black singer raises her chin to gaze imperiously over your head. A single fingernail, polished bright red, echoes the tip of a red slipper, stitched with gold threads. Both blood-red details emerge from the sinuous folds of a dazzling green dress, adding a touch of sexy danger to the painting’s regal--some would say queenly--drama.

The most complex oil-on-panel shows an aging matron so full of her own strength that she sends shivers down your spine. With radiant blue eyes that match a shimmering blue dress, this full-figured diva tips her head back, rests her right arm on the wainscoting and cocks her hip.

The slightest hint of a smirk breaks out of the corners of her mouth, whose icy pink lips seem to say, “Come hither and don’t mess with me.” Combining a palpable sense of jaunty panache with an otherwise severe Mayflower-dame bearing, this diva’s demeanor loads complicated emotions into simple gestures and expressions.

Simultaneously engaging and absolutely set in their ways, all of Kauper’s prima donnas get your attention and then do unanticipated things with it.

Not one of these women is beautiful, if judged by conventional standards, yet each is so captivating you can’t take your eyes off her. If you focus on any of their faces, these divas appear to be men--or at least as masculine as linebackers, as stately as ancient senators and more princely than aristocrats.

The unsettling, androgynous quality of these paintings demonstrates that Kauper has a deep understanding of how beauty works in contemporary art. In contrast to the quaint charm of “the Beautiful,” he uses beauty as a force that is risque, transgressive and unpredictable. Rather than dulling one’s senses, it heightens perceptions to a feverish pitch, causing involuntary responses and sometimes triggering moral dilemmas.

Kauper’s suite of divas rejects the Romantic idea that art must align itself with rock ‘n’ roll rebellion if it’s to have any kick. Preferring the overblown theatrics of modern culture’s high end, his deliciously subversive works reveal that powerful paintings, like potent operas, do not naturalize anything. Instead, they lure viewers into a world of exceptional artifice that’s more stimulating, intense and thrilling than the real thing.

* ACME Gallery, 1800-B Berkeley St., Santa Monica, (310) 264-5818, through May 24. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Fragments of a Mural: Since Sam Francis died in 1994, Los Angeles galleries and museums have presented numerous exhibitions of the prolific painter’s oils, acrylics, gouaches and watercolors. The latest installment of this memorializing impulse is a focused show at Manny Silverman Gallery titled “Sam Francis in New York, 1958-1960.”

Including 15 studies for a mural commissioned for Chase Manhattan Bank’s uptown office, as well as seven canvases made at about the same time, this handsomely installed exhibition is a treat for Francis scholars and connoisseurs. To a wider audience, however, it is of only passing interest.

Although a concise full-color catalog (with a straightforward essay by David Anfam) accompanies the show, the mural itself is not displayed. Because its owners refused to lend the roughly 8-by-39-foot canvas, viewers can study only Francis’ studies, comparing and contrasting various stages of development with one another but not with the finished work, except in reproduction.

Moreover, the sequence in which the studies were made is not known. One can only estimate the order in which they appeared.

To my eye, Francis began this project by breaking up the composition of his painting where a pair of pillars blocked one’s view of the wall on which it would hang. As his image got stronger, he increasingly ignored the format dictated by the office architecture, making a painting that could stand on its own wherever it might be displayed.

But that’s only a guess.

In any case, Francis was an intuitive painter whose best works are known for their improvisational openness, not for their rigorous, step-by-step evolution. None of the studies exhibited has the density, impact or fleshed-out fullness of the finished mural. Most of these works on paper are skeletal sketches that seem to have served as mere points of departure for the long, low mural.

The other paintings Francis made during the short time he lived in New York have a fractured, disjunctive quality that sets them apart from the more lyrical abstractions he painted in Paris, Santa Monica and Tokyo. Consequently, this exhibition functions as a minor footnote to an oeuvre already celebrated for its light-handed pizazz and jumpy, jubilant energy.

* Manny Silverman Gallery, 619 N. Almont Drive, (310) 659-8256, closed Sundays and Mondays. Through June 28.

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Benign Fantasy: Crisper than many photographic images and dreamier than most landscape paintings, Hilary Brace’s drawings combine the best of both worlds. At Tatistcheff/Rogers Gallery, the clouds, mountains, valleys and seas they depict form a fantastic world that is very much like this one, except in its details.

In almost all of Brace’s meticulously rendered pastels and charcoals, clouds appear to be more substantial than frothy oceans, which themselves seem to have greater substance than rolling green fields and dark, misty mountains. Many of the Santa Barbara-based artist’s images on paper and Mylar convey the sensation of flight, suggesting that viewers are no longer in contact with terra firma but soaring through skies bathed in sunlight.

Despite the topsy-turvy nature of the worlds pictured in Brace’s drawings, these jewel-like works are free of vertigo’s unsettling effects. All enchantment and benign fantasy, they give shape to an imaginary space full of nothing but wonder.

* Tatistcheff/Rogers Gallery, 2042 Broadway, Santa Monica, (310) 449-1240, through Saturday.

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Girdling the Hills: Japan-based photographer Toshio Shibata makes black-and-white prints of magnificent public works projects as if they were abstract decorations added to the landscape for purely aesthetic reasons.

At Gallery RAM, a dozen of these tightly cropped pictures show the sides of hills and mountains crisscrossed with complex combinations of retaining walls, buttresses, posts, struts, nets, sandbags, log fences and various cement drains, gutters and spillways. The best photographs make these elaborately engineered drainage systems look like industrial-strength crazy quilts, laid over the landscape by some playful giant.

Humanity’s age-old struggle to make a place for itself in the face of nature’s superior forces is clearly a subtext of Shibata’s prints. But most of their power derives from the restrained delight the photographer finds in his countrymen’s herculean efforts to keep hillsides in place by dressing them up in fantastic, one-of-a-kind costumes that function like massive girdles.

* Gallery RAM, 2525 Michigan Ave., Bergamot Station, Santa Monica, through Saturday.