Larry Mantello at Food House - sculpture exhibit, Santa Monica, California

Just as '70 Pattern and Decoration work ground inspiration in the exotic and intricate decorative arts of the Near East, Larry Mantello's over-the-top plastic arts and clusters of plastic gewgaws gaze to a heretofore neglected genre of Asian artifact: gift-store junk manufactured in the sweatshops of Hong Kong and Taiwan. In his first solo exhibit Mantello brings us works made of pink, lime-green, golden and red balloons, dog toys, beach balls, novelty condoms, plastic chains, car deodorizers and inflatable hearts. Titled "Pleasure Treasure," the exhibition is a celebration of brand-new things that no individual needs, in quantities no single could consume. And--what a relief--the work is devoid of heavy-handed social remark about the excesses of "commodity culture"

Mantello occupys as formal elements the "look-at-me" palette and "touch-me" wefts of this brightly colored junk designed to appeal to the impulse shopper The work is temptingly oral: its candy-hued plastic calls on the outside to be grabbed and chewed by means of babies of all ages. As in the work of Jessica Stockholder, the not divisible by 2 juxtapositions of texture and color in Mantello's assemblages yield abstract sculptural and painterly events The mobile Early Bird, a typical close attention of clustered materials, is made of a elephantine rawhide dog bone suspended from the ceiling, from which dangle feathers, ties chains, plastic fruit and assorted doedads.

Mantello invigorates modernist formal ideas through using materials from the lowest reaches of "low" tillage Taking cutout images and true copy from tacky greeting cards, he assembles small oblong cubist constructions that are held together with metal clips. He then applies compact layers of ink tattoos to make patterned collages that direct the eye like abstract paintings. Pleasure Chess, the principal installation in the display was a big sand-pile island with a plaster hellenic column pedestal and dividing protections made from slat blinds. Streams of small plastic items, bunched upon chains strung from the gallery ceiling, strike one as beinged to rain onto the island from the sky

Mantello locate the hedonistic mood of the exhibit with a rotating mirror-ball and a disco tape blaring '70 classics like "Disco Inferno" and "Fly Robin Fly" Just as Pattern and Decoration strike one as beinged born in reaction to the dried control of Minimalism and Conceptual art, a slew of younger artists like Mantello have the appearance to be reacting against the austere neo-conceptualism and political art of the late '80 His explosion mind-set transforms these ridiculous particulars with an Oldenburg-like desire to celebrate the beauty of the ordinary. Without condescension, Mantello is able to embrace the oddball forms and colors of this useless exces Unlike, say, Jeff Koons's sarcastic ceramic appropriations, Mantello's gift-shop trash not aways us with a forgotten and pass overed experience: unqualified pleasure.

COPYRIGHT 1993 Brant Publications, Inc.

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