ART REVIEWS : Ed Moses’ Work Draws the Line in Control-Freakism

Ed Moses is at work perfecting the risible line, the line that quivers, quavers, shudders and shivers with laughter. This line is never moderate. It moves either with geriatric torpor or breakneck speed.

Nor is it deliberate. The ink is sneezed out in ungraceful blots, hiccups at irregular intervals, scratches the surface as if it were a skin irritation or blows across the page, as weary as a sigh. The amazing thing is that this line does precisely what Moses wants it to do.

At Earl McGrath Gallery, Moses plays with the idea of the doubled image. A few of his drawings work like typical Rorschachs. Multi-limbed insects, fat crustaceans and/or man-eating plants materialize out of abstract patterns, depending on one’s state of mind. Most of the blots are unambiguously figural: twin prizefighters dripping with each other’s blood and tears; balding businessmen brothers staring each other down, their few strands of hair flying in sync; a pair of horned devils French-kissing with delirious abandon.

Inkblots are in vogue, perhaps because they exploit the seductions of both abstraction and trompe l’oeil . Yet Moses’ take is clearly very different from that of Bruce Conner, whose densely packed rows of miniature blots are concurrently on view at Kohn/Abrams Gallery.

Conner’s works read as strange and secret hieroglyphs, evoking monkish devotion and any number of obsessive-compulsive disorders. They are flamboyant exercises in control-freakism. Moses prefers to conceal his psychology, in order to encourage the viewer to confront his or her own.

* Earl McGrath Gallery, 454 N. Robertson Blvd., (310) 652-9850 , through Jan. 6. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Disrupting Space: Listening for the low-pitched rhythms that connect one thing to another can stimulate hyper-alertness while numbing consciousness. This is the bifurcated effect of Lawrence Carroll’s art.

Like Robert Ryman, Carroll favors a Minimal aesthetic. It is poetic yet prosaic: a constellation of derelict objects, part painting and part sculpture, which are buckled, stained, puckered, pitted, scarred and yet, astonishingly refined.

His objects are determined by a reduced set of variables--canvas, wood, oil, wax and staples. These are permutated, rotated and manipulated with an energy belied by the perfect calm of the resulting forms.

Some of the pieces in Carroll’s magnificent new show at Ace Contemporary Exhibitions are as large as mattresses, and hang on the wall just inches above the floor. Others are so small they all but escape notice, tucked into unexpected corners.

Each is colored off-white--just “off” enough to contrast with the antiseptic glow of the gallery’s white walls, and just weathered enough to hint at the sound of time passing.

If a gallery implies a certain fiction of eternity, Carroll disrupts this fiction with deliberate grace. He reconfigures the massive east wing at Ace in order to alter the viewer’s sight lines and movement through space.

Cavernous chambers are punctuated by smaller cells, which open onto darkened hallways and then onto even darker landings between floors. The empty space that surrounds the work is clearly as important as the work itself.

So is the position of one object in relation to another. Part of the pleasure of Carroll’s art is pondering why objects are placed where they are. Two stacks of rolled-up canvases in the center of the room are accompanied by two small, wall-mounted forms; three box-like paintings are mounted at hip height; a pile of small, semi-circular disks stand across from a lavishly stained canvas, leaning nonchalantly against the wall.

How objects exist in space, and how space exists in relation to objects are the overlooked questions Carroll brings to our notice, and then renders hypnotic.

* ACE Contemporary Exhibitions, 5514 Wilshire Blvd., (213) 935-4411 , through Jan. 29. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Bodies in Rest, Motion: Like the Bureau of Missing Persons, Kevin Miller is concerned with absent bodies, misplaced identities and fragmented selves. The title of his current exhibition at Newspace, “Lost and Found,” suggests that happy endings (or at least resolutions) remain possible.

The paintings and drawings themselves are less sanguine. They imply that the search itself is all. The best that can be hoped for is some form of distraction from its urgency.

Miller methodically goes through page after page of the phone book. Instead of finding whoever is missing--or simply finding someone to talk to--Miller highlights, alters, obfuscates and obliterates those pages. He turns them into art, to keep his fingers busy and his brain occupied.

Some of the pages are blacked out, with the names and numbers covered in white so they are visible only as broken lines. Others are whited out, the entries covered in black paint such that the whole becomes a geometric pattern. Mindless doodling goes in search of idle chatter, while desperation segues into a test of creative will.

These drawings are accompanied by a group of large “fingerprint” paintings in which idiosyncratic tokens of identity are recast as decorative motifs. Dots of red or black undulate across the canvas in subtle, lace-like patterns or merely with obsessive persistence. Nothing is revealed; the self, however multiplied, remains fugitive.

Somewhat more information is provided in gridded collages, in which hundreds of newspaper obituaries are push-pinned to the surface, each placed in smothering proximity to the other. The obituaries, many of which have been covered with wax, are barely legible; the only index of the individual’s accomplishments is the size of his or her purloined rectangle of text.

These collaged paintings are Miller’s own purloined rectangles, an attempt to find his own misplaced identity and to put back together his own fragmented self. As testaments to the artist’s vulnerability, and as the fulcrum of this fine show, they provide a provocative model of the artwork as memento mori .

* Newspace, 5241 Melrose Ave., (213) 469-9353 , through Jan. 8. Closed Sundays and Mondays.