Art Review: Sergio Danielle, Margi Scharff
by Joe Futtner
Sergio Danielle at the County Museum
LACMA Rental Division, Los Angeles (through April 14)
Valley Boy Makes it Big. Well, a little big. Included in a group exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art Rental Division are paintings by Studio City painter Sergio Danielle.
I’ve known Danielle for a couple of years, and I’ve seen reproductions of his work. However, until this exhibition I’ve not had the chance to see the actual paintings. Danielle is a figurative painter who is able to have it both ways. He is equally adept at rendering the figure in a “straight,” realist manner, or in a more abstract way.
A multi-paneled work, State of Mind, represents the artist’s attempt to effect a union between conventional realism and machine-form abstraction. Three painted panels (each depicting a male figure) are quite literally stitched together with steel cable, satisfying Danielle’s need to “do both, to connect between them [the polar representational modes].” The associations here run to those nifty industrial-flavored creations of minimalism, even though this work is anything but minimal.
Danielle started drawing as a kid, but found himself doing other things, including a stint in the Israeli army. He turned seriously to painting only in the past decade, quickly making up lost ground. Self-taught, he has experimented with various techniques, including the airbrush. But his first love and continued preoccupation is traditional oil paint.
A just-completed work in the show, Instrument and Man, speaks of this painter’s formal interests and accomplishments. A brightly colored, neo-cubistic rendition of a popular theme, Instrument and Man is a sophisticated and witty composition, suggesting stylistic influences from Leger to Botero to Oscar Schlemmer. And this from an artist who honestly asserts that he was “never in a museum” until in his twenties.
LACMA Rental Division Exhibition Six also features work by Hiroshi Kabayashi, Naomi Ozaki, David Rodgers and Kenny Schneider. 11am–4pm Wed.–Sat. Continues through April 14.
Margi Scharff at Woodbury University
Woodbury University Art Gallery, 7500 Glenoaks Blvd., Burbank (12–4pm Tues.–Sat.)
Now well into its first season, the art gallery at Woodbury University is establishing itself as a significant exhibition arena for contemporary art in the eastern San Fernando Valley. The current exhibition is an installation by artist Margi Scharff, entitled “Utterings.”
Buzzing along the information superhighway nowadays, we tend to overuse the term “multimedia.” But that’s exactly what Margi Scharff’s installation is: a multimedia exploration of the constituencies of the dream state, memory and autobiography. Along the way Scharff tackles a host of art world Big Issues, including the divisions that exist among the various arts (e.g., 2-D vs. 3-D), the mixed stylistic bag of Postmodernism, etc., etc. And she does this in a way that’s never heavy handed, but, in fact, is even a lot of fun.
Scharff refers to the installation at Woodbury University art gallery as a “series of miscellaneous connections.” Apart from the fact that a number of the “miscellaneous” elements Scharff incorporates are literal connectors—extension cords, twine, electrical conduit, cellular phone cords—the connections to which her work refers are as much internal, bound up with her development as a person and artist. These elements are rolled into spheres, each a zany twist on the ubiquitous ball of twine. These spheres convey a domestic, even a gendered quality, an implicit “girl stuff” vs. “boy stuff” dichotomy, adding another important dimension to the installation. (When one of these “unwinds” on the gallery wall, it does so in a wild, art nouveau-flavored whiplash, a kind of visual arts “ta-da.”)
Gallery Director Carolee Toon-Parker, who also teaches interior design at Woodbury, met the artist a couple of years back, when Scharff had a show at Cerritos College. “I realized that not a lot of people had the chance to see that show,” she says. “I liked her work, and thought this would be an excellent opportunity to bring it closer to us.”
I asked Toon-Parker what the Woodbury community—faculty, staff, and, particularly, the students—felt about work such as Scharff’s, which can be pretty challenging to the art neophyte. “I think it’s good that students in other areas get a chance to see [art] like this.” She adds that she and other Woodbury faculty and administrators recognized the need “to bring the experience of fine arts” to Woodbury, which does not have its own fine arts department. Thanks to this new facility and Toon-Parker’s direction, residents of Burbank and adjacent towns, as well the University, now have ready access to an active program of exciting, contemporary art. ♦