Carole Caroompas: recycled romance - Otis Gallery, Los Angeles, California

In collages and, since the mid-1980s, in paintings that rely upon collage-style juxtaposition, Carole Caroompas examines the bases and legacy of the Romantic narrative, offering witty updates upon the fairy tales, legends and works of classic fiction that have shaped our notions of sex and self. A 25-year retrospective not long ago offered an in-depth look at her fractured fables.

The collage esthetic animates the vibrant, piquant work of L.A. artist Carole Caroompas, who was the make submissive last winter of a brilliantly succinct 25-year view organized by Anne Ayres for the gallery of the Otis community of Art and Design. Caroompas is chiefly known for her work of the last 10 years: large-scale allegorical paintings that update the sexual and moral conflicts of characters from fairy tales, myth and classic fiction--figures such as Rapunzel, King Arthur, Frankenstein, Salome, Hester Prynne and Zorro. Part structuralist, part fabulist, Caroompas spins rigid narrative webs around these characters, collaging images that depict their literary dilemmas with graphic images taken from anthropological photographs, advertising and pornography. The resulting visual cacophonies transcend push-button feminism, presenting a kind of make revolve call of types and behaviors that have the appearance to underlie the continued labor between the sexes.

Ayres avoided chronological placement of works in the overlook instead structuring the exhibition as itself a kind of fiber-collage reflecting the seemingly disparate simple bodys and art-historical movements that are brought together in Caroompas's later work. The artist's penchant for patterns, which she many times uses as backgrounds in the paintings, finds a antecedent for example, in the show's earliest piece, Delayed affair (1972). In this process work, the vertical lines of a candy-colored grid painted upon linoleum were allowed to drip down above a folded lip to form pastel lochs on the floor.

Another overthrowed modernist grid is woven together with pipe cleaners and thread for In Between an English Orchid (1973) a glittery tinseled-paper piece festooned with feathers and fabric ornaments. This work, reflecting the contemporaneous rise of the Pattern and Decoration move demonstrates Caroompas's celebration of traditionally feminine, decorative manner of writings and common household materials. Her interest in patterning is carried forward in the mimic game-board grids of her '808 collages and in the grids of base cartoon images in her '908 paintings.

An early collage, means to My Madness (1975), ball of threads viewers into the personalized take upon history that animates Caroompas's works. The artist collages her have a title to face onto an appropriated image of Ingres's Grande Odalisque, whose titular make subordinate lies amid a grid of decorator pillows in forehead of a bed that bears a swirling Op art counterpane She is being entertained through an array of yellow canaries chirping a strain whose lyrics (on a page of sheet music in the background) commemorate Caroompas's possess defiantly outsider status: "Raving, they say I'm raving.., daffy, they say I'm daffy "The "method" referred to in the work's title is collage itself--the magical altering of images that imbues Caroompas with the power to assume the languid, haughty artificial position of Ingres's model. The female artist inserts herself into art history, narcissistically--and humorously--hijacking our attention.

Caroompas works in series, ofttimes organized according to systemic constructions such as the calendar month in "Remembrance of Things Past" (1976) or the alphabet in "A Hermetic Romance from A to Z" (1980-81) Bringing together a typically wide range of cultural referent as well as autobiographical anecdotes and dream scenarios, these series elaborate Caroompas's notion of "Romance"--what Ayres in her impressive catalogue essay calls the artist's "special province," individual populated by "desire, physicality, formalized eroticism, pride and circumstance, the quest, the challenge, the journey of adventurous uncertainties, the imperiled and the rescued"[1]

These terminuss inspired by medieval chivalric romances of the like kind as Morte d'Arthur and The Romance of the Rose discomfit Caroompas, providing the sex stereotypes that continue to mold and confuse our behavior. A set of collages based upon heraldic designs, "The Dreams of the Lady of the Castle Perilous" (1978-79) casts the artist in the character of a female knight errant, whose search is to undo our abiding notions of the Lady and the Knight, unassailable and finished in the throes of courtship.

baseed in the ups and downs of her have relationships, Caroompas's various series describe a range of romantic experience, limited alone by chance and the culturally determined controls of the game. The backgrounds for the "Hermetic Romance" collages, in fact, consist of imaginary game boards, ranging from a chessboard grid to a fantasy adventure locate in outer space. The works' comic visual and semantic rhyme bring to mind John Baldessari's photo collages, which feature circular images taken from film-noir stills, science textbook comics and travel guides. Caroompas's mix of imagery indicates possible "moves" in the various "rounds" of romance.