Two L.A. Artists Display a Modernist Connection

Two otherwise-unrelated exhibitions at Cal State L.A. present Expressionist images by the familiar Chicano master Gronk and illusionist hard-edge abstractions by the lesser-known Marion Stiebel Siciliano. “Gronk at Cal State L.A.” is located in the departmental fine arts gallery and was put together by Cal State L.A. professor Ed Forde. It’s a curiously disorganized strew of paintings, drawings and prints that nonetheless manages to affirm that the artist is a very talented guy.

Gronk, whose full name is Glugio Gronk Nicandro was born in L.A. in 1954. He emerged artistically in the early ‘70s as a member of the activist performance group Asco--Spanish for “nausea.” His co-conspirators were Harry Gamboa, Patssi Valdez and Willie Herron. They did everything from Day of the Dead celebrations to antiwar protests and graffiti murals.

Despite his authentic credentials as a pioneer barrio street artist, Gronk’s work delivers a different message. His present show centers on a suite of three large canvases collectively titled “Tormenta Cantata.” Each depicts a black-haired woman with her back to us. She wears a low-cut black formal gown and is flanked by an oversize cocktail glass and a candle. In each variation, she stares into a chaotic miasma full of accusing eyes and menacing shadows.

The most striking thing about the image is that it doesn’t feel like a painting made in contemporary L.A. It feels like something done in an imaginative realm located somewhere close to Berlin around the 1920’s. Its heavy black outlines bear less resemblance to the work of a street muralist than to the painterly attack of a German Expressionist like Max Beckmann. Which is not to say that Gronk is excessively derivative. His work has its own spin. If it lacks Beckmann’s literary density, it certainly equals his sense of satire and capacity to create the ominous sense of a highly cultivated society falling into barbarism.

All of which seems to prove that starting out as a grass-roots political activist by no means precludes the emergence of a high-style cosmopolitan attitude that links Gronk to the mainstream of classic modernism.

Marion Stiebel Siciliano’s exhibition--titled “Abstraction/Symbolism”--is located in the art gallery of Cal State’s Luckman Fine Arts Complex and organized by its director Patricia Woodlin.

It has to be a coincidence that there’s a German connection in this show too, but there it is. An accompanying brochure avoids giving the date of Siciliano’s birth but does tell us it happened in Frankfurt on Main, that she fled the Nazis in 1938 and took up residence in Boston. Now she lives here.

Her biography reports other information that will give pause to anybody accustomed to reading such accounts. She has five children and is fluent in several languages. That’s less surprising than the fact that she’s an avid river-rafting enthusiast and mountain hiker. Which is less surprising than the presence of a longish list of posts with organizations dedicated to social betterment.

She’s been chair of the Tree People, served on the boards of Economic Resources Corp./Watts Towers, is an active member of the Sierra Club, and the World Wildlife Fund not to mention a variety of arts organizations. Admirable, but when does she find time to paint? Frankly it sounds like the vitae of an amateur.

The work itself, however, says that if Siciliano is something of a semi-pro she’s one worth looking at. The exhibition consists of some 20 mid-size canvases. Their hard-edge abstract style has roots in the German Bauhaus and branches reaching into the geometric illusionism and shaped canvases of Frank Stella and Ellsworth Kelly.

Works like, “The Lucius Fault” succeed in controlling complex problems of optical perception. It consists of three interlocked planes in muted black, blue and red that echo a rhomboidal hole at the center. Shapes knife in and out of their own space with convincing assurance. “The Humming Heart” is a circle of target-like concentrics in prismatic colors.

It rewards a few seconds of staring with the illusion of looking at an object made of solid nesting rings. The ensemble--all from the past decade--has a variety suggesting an artist too inventive to fall into formula.

It’s solid, intelligent, sometimes playful stuff that manages to convey great pleasure in the doing and a likable lack of larger ambition.

* Gronk in the Fine Arts Gallery to Feb. 6; closed Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays, (213) 343-4040. Siciliano in the Luckman Fine Arts to Feb. 28, closed Fridays and Sundays (213) 343-6604.)