ART GALLERIES : Melancholic and Vibrant Images in ‘Cafe de Flore’

A comic encyclopedia of postwar European bohemianism takes on larger-than-life proportions in an impressive selection of Jorg Immendorff’s “Cafe de Flore” paintings at Ace Contemporary Exhibitions. Begun in 1987, the Dusseldorf-based artist’s ongoing series is an autobiographical exploration of his extended social circle. As phantasmagorical as it is factual, his theatrical work is riddled with dreamy metaphors and packed with juicy bits of realism.

In the largest painting, which measures 10-by-30-feet and almost swallows you up in its colorful drama, Joseph Beuys lights Marcel Duchamp’s cigar as 40 of the art world’s movers and shakers sit still and expressionless. A low grade of boredom permeates the picture: Immendorff’s famous friends seem to be patiently waiting--like well-mannered vultures--for something interesting to happen. Neither overtly jaded nor grossly self-satisfied, they float in a state of suspended animation.

In another giant, more vibrantly colored image that fuses the scale of murals with the saturated light of easel painting, a pack of rambunctious, fun-loving monkeys somersault through the air as the artist drifts by in an upside-down underwater scene. In other paintings, Immendorff washes the feet of a prostitute, feeds a donkey, scrawls in chalk on the sidewalk, and visits figures from recent art history.

Although his work is sometimes grouped with the neo-Expressionists, his highly developed Pop sensibility prevents him from fitting into this Angst -plagued contingent who prefer cynicism to silliness and criticism to celebration.

Immendorff’s art embodies a sense of dissipated melancholy. It takes its place between the operatic bathos of Anselm Kiefer’s one-act morality plays and the irrepressible playfulness of Sigmar Polke’s freewheeling alchemy. Its wit is unique in German art because it suggests that a postwar painter’s interior life is not necessarily defined by nostalgia, ennui or inherited guilt.

“Cafe de Flore” represents a spirited search not for national identity but for art’s place in a modern, cosmopolitan world. For Immendorff, the cafe, which is part theater and street scene, an open place where public and private lives intermingle, is still a psychologically charged model for painting.

* Ace Contemporary Exhibitions, 5514 Wilshire Blvd., second floor, (213) 935-4411, through Jan. 29. Closed Sundays and Mondays. Hypnotic Power: Bruce Conner’s intricate drawings appear to be fragmented inventories of an alien alphabet that is so sophisticated, accurate and nuanced that it’s useless.

Each of the thousands of unique, insect-like pictographs that make up his prolific grids of inkblots seems to describe such precise information that it cannot possibly refer to anything else. Unable to be reused, these fantastic hieroglyphics live their lives in an instant: Born for a single purpose, they die with its fulfillment.

The desire for perfection thus fuses with the behavior of a dysfunctional obsessive in Conner’s hauntingly beautiful drawings. The legendary Bay Area artist’s intimately scaled works at Kohn/Abrams Gallery evoke the image of an anti-social misfit whose ability to focus intensely is matched only by the skills of religious mystics.

Conner’s dark art has the simultaneous presence of a primal, archaic language and the futuristic creatures that might be found on intergalactic trips. Consciousness gets lost contemplating their lacy labyrinths. Each viewer’s neuroses and barely repressed impulses get lured out of hiding as they’re projected onto Conner’s miniature, homemade Rorschach blots.

This seductive yet scary experience pales in comparison to the mind-numbing ritual that goes into his repetitive, labor-intensive work. To make each small drawing, Conner manipulates hundreds of droplets of black ink. He exactly folds the paper at least once for each of its myriad characters, cajoling unpredictable yet symmetrical stains into existence. A single mistake or smudge and the delicate, overall pattern is ruined.

Like magical incantations, Conner’s mesmeric arrays of shapes seem haunted by Celtic diagrams, Islamic patterns, Native American symbols, and secret designs of occult sects. None of these associations, however, accounts for the hypnotic power of his highly original art.

Conner’s images defy the logic of language so that they might catch a glimpse of something inimical to its conventions, some inarticulate sensation that could be described as sublime, if this idea wasn’t so unfashionable.

* Kohn/Abrams Gallery, 9002 Melrose Ave., (310) 278-8790, through Jan. 15. Closed Sundays and Mondays. Carefree Modernist: Wearing their sources on their sleeves, Emerson Woelffer’s newest paintings rank among the loosest and most carefree he has made. The 80-year-old modernist’s honest homage to Picasso takes off from “Girl Before a Mirror,” transforming the masterpiece’s occasionally malicious Cubist distortions into a joyous celebration of androgynous form.

In Woelffer’s 16 medium-size paintings at Manny Silverman Gallery, energized lines define the contours of an ambiguous biomorphism. Plump and pendulous, bold and bulbous, its shapes partake in a game of artistic gender-bending. The mirror, like the paintings, sometimes catches the world in reverse, or simply reveals what’s there, but from a different angle or altered perspective.

Although Woelffer’s series elaborates upon a single image, consistently simplifying its lines and reducing its painterly incidents to bold strokes and solid fields of color, his similarly composed works never bog down in unnecessary repetition. Like snazzy improvisations on a set theme, they are vitally animated and remarkably fresh.

Woelffer’s swiftly brushed paintings marry the disjointed meatiness of Picasso’s often torturously distended figures to the graceful ease of Matisse’s less tangible and more rhythmic abstractions. He shows us a side of modernism unconcerned with originality but willing to work through the achievements of established masters.

* Manny Silverman Gallery, 619 N. Almont Drive, (310) 659-8256, through Jan. 15. Closed Sundays and Mondays.