From Cuba, Artists Speak the Language of Absurdity

Los Carpinteros (the Carpenters) are three young Cuban artists whose collaborative work is on view in a spirited show at the Iturralde Gallery. The artists--Alexandre Arrechea, Marco Castillo and Dagoberto Rodriguez--are brilliant practitioners of the art of inversion.

“The Nap,” for instance, consists of a simple wooden rocking chair piled high with plump, crisp, white pillows--so high (to the gallery ceiling) that there’s no room left on the chair to sit. The work invites rest while simultaneously denying it, even mocking it with an excess of its seductive accouterments.

Another of the trio’s darkly witty sculptures takes the form of an octagonal wooden lighthouse, about 12 feet high. Its sides are comprised of dozens of doors, each with a measurement stenciled in ink on its face. Several of the doors are ajar, allowing a view inside the structure to what the title refers to as “150,230 cm3of Darkness.”

Articulating a void with great precision and constructing a monument to emptiness, Los Carpinteros offer a Conceptual art simultaneously sweetened with humor and spiced with social critique. Their beacon of darkness makes an easy but nonetheless potent metaphor for popular disillusionment with the Cuban revolution.

The utopian ideal has, during these artists’ lifetimes, inverted into a dystopian reality, but Los Carpinteros handle dysfunction as craftily as the wood that has become their signature material. They are fluent in absurdity and irony.

Several large drawings on acetate are also included in the show. Each diagrams a simple, familiar object (a bicycle, a sewing machine) or an instrument of war (a hand grenade, a tank). The lines describing the sewing machine resemble stitches, and all of the parts of the tank are labeled in English except for the most lethal parts, which are identified in Spanish. Such gestures are clever, but more affecting is the artists’ very choice of subjects and the way the weapons assume an everyday familiarity next to the more benign domestic items. That plainspokenness is disarming and, together with the edgy whimsy of the sculptures, makes this, the first L.A. show for Los Carpinteros, the highlight of the mini-festival of Cuban art now being staged on La Brea Avenue, with the Alberto Korda show at Couturier Gallery and Jose Figueroa’s photographs at Jan Kesner Gallery.

* Iturralde Gallery, 154 N. La Brea Ave., Los Angeles, (323) 937-4267, through Nov. 25. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Official Revolutionary: Candid photographs of public figures have been popular just as long as cameras have been able to make them--since the 1920s, when new, hand-held “toys” like the Leica began to catch leaders at leisure and to cater to the voyeur in all of us. Access is the key to making such images, and access, more than an idiosyncratic or remarkable style, is what Alberto Korda had when he became an official photographer of the Cuban revolution.

Korda (born in 1928), whose Couturier Gallery show is his first solo outing in the U.S., traveled with Fidel Castro and Che Guevara for nearly a decade, documenting them at work and at play. In new prints made from negatives from the 1950s and 1960s, we see Fidel and Che playing golf (golf?!) and fishing, Fidel hunting with Nikita Khruschev and shaking hands with Ernest Hemingway, Che having coffee with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. For the most part, the pictures are straightforward and uninflected, any dynamism within owing primarily to the charisma of the subjects themselves.

Guevara had charisma to spare, more so after his early death, a martyr to the cause. With international dissemination of Korda’s 1960 portrait of him, gazing upward in a starred beret, Guevara took on saint-like powers. This image--which appears in three versions in this show and is commonly referred to as the most famous photograph in the world--can be found hanging next to images of Christ in home altars around the world.

That picture alone has secured Korda a place in the annals of photographic history, something that his fashion photographs (a selection of which are on view here) wouldn’t necessarily do, for all their spare elegance. Korda is a revolutionary through and through, and several of his best photographs--of a girl cradling a chunk of wood as her only doll, or of a man perched on a lamppost above rallying masses--pull the emotional heartstrings like only good old-fashioned propaganda can.

* Couturier Gallery, 166 N. La Brea Ave., Los Angeles, (323) 933-5557, through Nov. 28. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Follow the Line: The hypnotic appeal of the spiral is just one of the reasons Charles Christopher Hill’s new paintings at Cirrus are so deliciously mesmerizing. The movement of the spiraling line, whether making a fat snail shell of two orbits or a tighter coil of six, keeps the surface of Hill’s paintings in continuous motion. But Hill doesn’t just lead us in circles; he also pulls us deep into the surface itself, which he has built up into a thick, luminous skin through repeated layerings of paint and varnish.

Previous incarnations of the spiraling line hover around the periphery of the uppermost one, like a nimbus or echo. The line is usually black or a rich, blood red, but touches of smoke, sunflower or teal tease its edges, whispering the history of its own making. Time’s passage feels palpable in these paintings. Translucence and opacity play off one another as they do in the variably penetrable layers of memory.

One of the seven large paintings in the show and most of the smaller ones feature a sequence of more-or-less straight, parallel lines, painted in the same fashion as the spirals, against the same sort of ground the color and texture of burnished eggshell. Less absorbing than the spirals, the line paintings derive from Marcel Duchamp’s “standard stoppages,” in which the artist dropped threads onto a canvas and fixed them with varnish in whatever random patterns they formed.

The spiral paintings, too, have a specific source: a technically extraordinary engraving by 17th-century French artist Claude Mellan, in which Christ’s face is rendered using only a single, spiraling line of varying thickness. Hill has long given process an overt presence in his art, though these paintings are neither as controlled as Mellan’s engraving, as dependent on chance as Duchamp’s works, nor as suggestive of erosion as his own earlier work. More about retention than loss, they are beautiful, self-contained time capsules of gesture, color, light and time itself.

* Cirrus, 542 S. Alameda St., Los Angeles, (213) 680-3473, through Dec. 5. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Fire Next Time: Barbara Hashimoto’s richly textured new work at Gallery Soolip conjures up fire’s split personality--its power to sustain life and to extinguish it. Hashimoto splits her attention in this show, too, between work addressing the Hindu practice of sati--a widow’s self-immolation on her husband’s funeral pyre--and the moral lessons of Hindi storybooks.

As in her last, quietly moving show here, Hashimoto’s sati work unfolds as a highly aestheticized meditation on the gender dynamics implicit in the custom, which draws its name from the Sanskrit word for a faithful or virtuous wife. Through fragments of text scattered among small, page-like panels of paper or clay, Hashimoto challenges the notion that women practiced sati willingly, in one case citing a historical account of women being forced into the flames with bamboo rods.

The discontinuous, corroded texts of the Hindi storybooks impairs any attempt to draw real meaning from them. But, in the case of the sati-themed work, such fragmentation and erosion resonate evocatively with the subject at hand. Hashimoto’s strength is in creating textural equivalents to the conditions of compromise, violation, fragility and endurance that are integral to her discussion of sati.

In several works, she coats paper book pages with wax, then types over them, the impact of the manual typewriter’s keys palpable as it penetrates the page and even forces small perforations in it. In other works, she mounts groups of clay tablets that seem ashen, weakened perhaps from burns around the edges, though it was fire that made the substance strong.

* Gallery Soolip, 550 Norwich Drive, West Hollywood, (310) 360-0154, through Nov. 28. Closed Sunday-Tuesday.