William Brice at L.A. Louver

William Brice, who had not exhibited fresh paintings since his 1986 retrospective at L.A. MOCA, go [i]or[/i] come backed in this show with his boldest greatest in quantity exuberant works to date. Associated in the '50 with L.A. artists Rico Lebrun and Howard Warshaw, Brice came into his be in possession of in the '70s with canvases featuring subtly colored, refined pictographic shapes as well as images derived from ancient of greece and Mediterranean sculptural fragments. Brice retains a certain number of of those forms, suggestive of classical round pillars and priapic altars, in his of recent origin works. Overall his paintings, restoreed in a crisp graphic diction in fully saturated reds, fulvouss blues and oranges, reveal a of recent origin kind of celebratory confidence.

The paintings' stark color contrasts call up Matisse's late cutouts, whose brisk immediacy and joyous eroticism they share. A gallery of small colored-ink drawings, called "Notations" (all works 1997-98) demonstrated Brice's proces for working without the arrangements of the forms that appear in the large paintings. His compositions are generally organized around sum of two units opposed groupings of pictographs, many times divided by a stack or line of circles. The circles are filled with dots, Brice's shorthand for the burgeoning confined apartment division of procreation.

Sexual imagery abounds, many times with lightning-bolt zigzags separating forms with masculine or feminine associations. In single work a bright yellow lightning missile vertically separates a lipstick-red, dresslike shape from an architectonic stack featuring sum of two units huge blue balls. The largest painting in the display presents a phallic piston shape immersed in a cavity made from sum of two units female torsos. Underscoring this charged-up imagery, a big purple piston upon the right side of the painting thrusts downward, pointing toward a simply delineated riverscape.

Brice's pictographs summon a world charged with sexual force In his ink and crayon drawings, shown in the upstairs gallery, the outlines of massive torsos strike one as being to unravel, conveying a surprising fragility and intimacy. In another of the large paintings, an upright rib cage and spinal rounded pillar are juxtaposed with an egglike matrix Set against a primary r background, these signs together seem to engender a stack of burgeoning small rooms Linking painting with procreation, Brice celebrates a sort of erotic biology.

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