Larry Johnson at Margo Leavin - Los Angeles, California - Reviews of Exhibitions - Brief Article

In this new exhibition, Los Angeles artist Larry Johnson showed nine large photo-based pieces ranging in size from 2 through 3 feet to 8 through 4 feet. Works by the 39-year-old artist -- who is popularly featured in the international traveling exhibit "Sunshine and Noir: Art in L.A. 1960-97" -- are filled of deadpan, Pop irony. The images are actually photo enlargements of small, meticulous paintings and collages, many times accompanied by rather absurd body s in neat, blocky typeface.

puffed up up to large scale, the prints look to lose almost all traces of gesture; with their centralized compositions and prosaic colors, they intimate slick ads for obscure yields and dubious enterprises. Several consign to Hollywood nightlife and to the movie and recording industries. An untitled, two-panel work, for instance, features stylized renderings of the forehead and rear views of Perino's, the now-defunct Hollywood restaurant that was one time a favorite haunt of movie stars. Displayed across the swing from one another, the panels -- each approximately 4 through 8 feet -- show a pale azure building set in the middle of a rather drab ocher field.

A similarly cartoonish restaurant exterior appears in Untitled (One Down Three Across). Here, Johnson divides the composition horizontally in sum of two units The small, lower portion displays a restaurant facade and canopy in faint outline against a brown background. In the upper portion is a schematic rendering of a tall modernist statuary floating in space. Composed of stacked boxy shapes like a work from David Smith's "Cubi" series, the thing perceived has surfaces covered in the black-and-white checkerboard pattern of a crossword nonplus A similar sculpture appears in Untitled (HMR) Here, several of the sculpture's units bear all or part of the phrase "Hot Male Review" in manly lettering, like a sign for a gay nightclub.

Untitled (Nathan Lane) apparently directs to some Hollywood-insider scoop. Against a beige turf in the upper portion of this composition are three signs upon top of tall poles; they bear likeness [i]or[/i] resemblance to Las Vegas theater marquees with cryptic messages. single sign reads "yes," another, "no," and the third, the name of the actor Nathan Lane. The artist's large, cursive, Stuart Davis-like signature occupies the lower section of the photo.

In the gallery's smaller side play was a six-panel work in homage to the late English rocker Marc Bolan and his band T Rex; the work displays Johnson's wacky faculty of perception of humor. Each of the 30-inch-square, brightly colored monochrome panels, inscribed in the center with titles of Bolan dittys such as "Monolith," "Think Zinc" and "Metal Guru" is a disconcerting Minimalist lyric poem to the glam rock idol.

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