A Fine Madness

Jacob Landau's drawings confront horrific realities with clear eyes.

By Robin Rice

Jacob Landau: Old Man Mad About Drawing

Printed Image Gallery, Brandywine Workshop, 730 S. Broad St., through Apr. 20, 546-3675.

Pepn Osorio: En La Barbera no se Llora

Tyler Galleries, Closed.

Christina Kubisch: Cross-Examination (Sound + Light)

Goldie Paley Gallery, Moore College of Art and Design, 20th St. and the Parkway, through Mar. 24, 568-4515.

When one reads in Judith Stein's catalogue essay that Jacob Landau has owned a set of Goya's Caprichos for much of his working life, a puzzle piece locks into place, confirming one's sense of Landau's kinship to Goya's human-centered but nightmarish view of life. Likewise, Landau's links to William Blake and North European printmakers like Drer are confirmed in Stein's concentrated, thoughtful remarks. Realists are susceptible to a kind of horrific surrealism, as their unflinching stare at human beings sees too much of what we call "inhumanity."

The broad sweep of Landau's works on paper, documented in a retrospective exhibition at Brandywine Workshop's Printed Image Gallery, moves from the pristine professionalism of the 1937 scratchboard illustration Husky to the social commentary of '60s watercolors like Burn Blood Brother to a delicate, fragmented later style. A potpourri of sketchbook pages reveals Landau thinking visually in a variety of modes.

A high point of the exhibition is the large charcoal drawing Sisyphus (1961, lent by the Philadelphia Museum of Art). Dense blacks and a girder-like composition suggest Franz Kline, though, like all of Landau's work, it is figurative. A staggering throng of Sisyphuses evokes, as in many of Landau's works, a temporal element: afterimages or ghosts — repetitions which become another form of the fragmentation he so often depicts. These figures labor under the burden of stones, blocky, rather than round as usually depicted, though a couple are also carrying other humans.

Recent cycles of drawing achieve that rare poetic/narrative flow that we associate with Goya and Blake, in which the link between works moves beyond verbal and iconic unity into a mysterious communicative sphere. Over the years, Landau has concentrated increasingly on drawing not what is there but what is not there. Lines and sometimes colors define the negative shapes, the spaces between the fragmented bodies he draws. In the Revelation Cycle Landau complements this technique with empty outlined stenciled letters, suitable to his visionary subject matter.

The Frances Cycle, documenting Landau's wife's experience with Alzheimer's disease, is compassionate and surprisingly accessible, uniting Frances' repetitious oblique utterances with flowing surreal drawings. It is a wise way of approaching the disease: accepting the pain, recording it, transforming it.

Black Hole (1976) is a cruciform copier collage (not part of a cycle), incorporating photographic and textual elements, including a portrait of Hitler, in an apparent meditation on the Holocaust. Here, emotion which mediated affectionately between the artist and his subject in the Frances Cycle is bitter and unforgiving.

Pepn Osorio's barber shop installation, recently on view at Temple Gallery in Center City and now on its way to Paris, is a bittersweet Fellini-esque vision in which the elements of a Puerto Rican masculine cultural milieu are presented, but bigger, brighter, multiplied. Baroque gold plastic tissue box covers, inexpensive hair products in a cardboard display, a chart depicting "NY Styles" of haircuts, red velvet seat cushions ornamented with the imprints of muscular male buttocks and backs or with the images of a pair of hands, automobile tail-lights, statuettes of race horses, hood ornaments — even a car seat propped against the ivy-leaf wallpaper and a cozy table with a domino game in progress — all bring a smile of nostalgia for a culture one recognizes as an organic reality even though one hasn't personally experienced it.

BUT don't get too sentimental: the title, "En La Barbera No Se Llora," translates to "No Crying Allowed In The Barber Shop!" Then why has Osorio peppered his videos, scattered throughout the installation, with film of men and boys weeping? Clich has it that the first haircut is an occasion for tears: a boy's initiation into the world of men — physically painless but perhaps psychically much more ambiguous.

In United States culture there is no masculine equivalent of the glamorous, accessorized Barbie and her sisters (boyfriend Ken is just another accessory). In this installation Osorio develops a Barbie-style iconography for Latinos. It looks like fun: weight-lifting, dressing well, gambling, receiving civic honors, winning trophies and, of course, getting great haircuts — looking good in so many ways. But machismo is demanding — defeating even. Gender becomes a beloved cultural prison.

A bubbling aquarium contains a colored statuette of the Last Supper (shades of Andres Serrano!) surrounded by numerous "groom" wedding cake figurines. Clouds of tiny babies bobbing on the surface have a sinister air. All those grooms and not a bride or pin-up girl in sight! Lacan says that woman is the signifier of man. Where are the snapshots of cute girlfriends? Osorio's barbera seems more exclusively masculine than a monastery (which would at least have an image of the Virgin). This male enclave is self-defining, fixated entirely on images reflected in the many mirrors — either oneself or the well-groomed man across the room. But looking too long at him might suggest a cultural/religious taboo! Maybe the guys in the videos are crying from frustration.

The super-abundance of imagery in La barbera reminds me of the recipe for rock candy. You dissolve so much sugar in hot water that it can't remain fluid when the liquid cools and, so, forms extra-large crystals around a thread which is placed in the water. In the installation, when the visitor is visually and psychologically saturated, concepts begin to crystallize around the thematic thread the artist has provided.

Christina Kubisch's installation at Goldie Paley Gallery works on a contrastingly minimal principle. Though it offers both visual and auditory pleasures, they are spare. A kind of meditative receptiveness is helpful.

Kubisch participated in the recent Prison Sentences exhibition at Eastern State Penitentiary with Skylights , a series of installations which combined the resonances of the glass harmonica with phosphorescent pigment lit by black light. Her work at Goldie Paley is a coda to or perhaps a summary of Skylights .

There are two — or perhaps three if you count a group of sketches — sections to the show. What I perceive as the central part of the installation is a radiating pattern of stones set in a darkened cave-like gallery. The arrangement of glowing rocks on the floor echoes the radiating architectural plan of Eastern State Penitentiary. The stones, taken from Eastern State's Death Row, have been painted with a pigment which fluoresces under black light (it's sometimes used in criminal investigations). Here the old stones seem here to give back a silent cold energy.

An irony in Kubisch's use of Death Row materials is that no one was ever executed at Eastern State (though some local residents claim to remember the dimming of electricity for electrocutions, prisoners were taken elsewhere to die). The particular horror of Eastern State was a kind of living death spent in total isolation. This sensory deprivation seems implicit in the hushed purple-shadowed gallery — an isolation that the prison's builders hoped would lead to enlightenment but which, more probably, produced madness.

The second part of Kubisch's work is a sunny contrast. A cluster of trees outside the Levy gallery (in the same building) is wired with solar panels which chirp and twitter even on cloudy days. Nature presents a companionable and warm face, contrasted with the chill portrait of Eastern State.