LAWEEKLY

VOL. 26 NO. 23
Apr. 30 - May 6, 2004

Carl Nicholas Titolo, Yek

Carl Titolo inherits directly and unabashedly from cubism, futurism, dada and constructivism, Paul Klee and Giorgio de Chirico, prolifically but fastidiously reconstituting their modernist lessons in drawings, collages and small paintings whose exquisite craft offsets their spirit (not quality) of offhand diaristic notation. Titolo’s mini-multimedia concoctions also display an obsession with a recurring subject: Italy. He may live and teach in New York, but he really lives when he goes grand-touring throughout the peninsula. “Smoking through Italy” is a sequence of vibrant self-portraits, as clever and varied as a Saul Steinberg series, made alla tabacchi from Milan to Naples. The “Tabletop Puzzles” pays homage at once to the cubist still life and to the manifold trattorie Titolo has treated himself to during his wanderings. Several other series are on view, most landscape variations and reveries dating from the last decade and a half. Don’t miss the four heraldic but droll “Attenti al Cane” — l’arf per l’arte.

Scuola di Las Vegas hero Yek has also reverted to modernist language, abandoning his electrically colored, knowingly empty canvas-objects for a much less symmetrical, and much less ironic, formula. The new approach revives the shaped-canvas geometric abstraction of the 1960s. If you know your Interstate 15, however, you’ll soon see wide-open Ameriscapes in the arrangements of three flat, irregular color-shapes per long, corner-lopped canvases. The color areas represent landscape elements, partly as we see them (especially in rear-view mirrors, whose oblong shape recurs in the shape of the paintings), partly as abstracted, even distilled essences. What Yek has done is devised flags of a sort for the spaces we Far Westerners inhabit — more modernist heraldry.

Carl Nicholas Titolo at Double Vision, 5820 Wilshire Blvd. (323) 936-1553.

Yek at Western Project, 3830 Main St., Culver City. (310) 838-0609. Both thru May 8.

—Peter Frank

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