Los Angeles Times

‘ Spots’ zeros in on the oddness

- By Leah Ollman Koplin Del Rio Gallery, 6031 Washington Blvd., Culver City, ( 310) 836- 9055, through July 11. Closed Sunday through Tuesday. koplindel rio. com

Fred Stonehouse’s amusing, sometimes haunting paintings adopt many of the convention­s of portraitur­e — head- and- shoulders framing, three- quarter view — but the subjects assume a kind of allegorica­l stature, tarot card- like, representi­ng a mythic persona, fantastic condition or daunting syndrome.

“Spots,” among the most wonderfull­y unnerving, shows a young man with one blue eye and one blackened green one. The rest of his features are obscured, obliterate­d by a constellat­ion of oval dots in mustard, crimson, white and olive. The marks have a clown- like buoyancy, but at the same time connote a strange sort of physical and psychic bruising.

The abraded background­s of the paintings and their deep, heavy frames push the works into a nebulous time zone, several steps removed from our own. Stonehouse’s “Devils and the Dead” series of paintings on old black- andwhite studio portraits, many with internal captions, similarly skews the familiar, playfully prodding it into the realm of the odd or grotesque.

Stonehouse shares the gallery with Minneapoli­s artist Melissa Cooke, a former grad student of his at the University of Wisconsin.

Cooke’s technique of brushing powdered graph- ite onto paper yields a slightly softened, stunning realism, rich in tonality. Her strongest works mimic spontaneou­s urban collages, segments of walls layered with graffiti, cartoonish sketches and poster- like images of cultural f igures, including Benjamin Franklin and Jean- Michel Basquiat. Cooke deftly conjures the found visual poetry of such places, their free- associativ­e density and zest.

 ?? Fred Stonehouse ?? ARTIST Fred Stonehouse’s marvelousl­y unnerving 2015 portrait “Spots.”
Fred Stonehouse ARTIST Fred Stonehouse’s marvelousl­y unnerving 2015 portrait “Spots.”
 ?? Blaine Campbell ?? ANDREW DADSON’S “Rose” nods to Jay DeFeo’s most famous work of excess, “The Rose.”
Blaine Campbell ANDREW DADSON’S “Rose” nods to Jay DeFeo’s most famous work of excess, “The Rose.”

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