Two California artists delve into detail

By Victoria Gail-White
Advertiser Art Critic

•	'On Wanting to Grow Horns: The Little Theater of Tom Knechtel' 'Tony Berlant: Recent Works' Through June 15 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday; noon-4 p.m. Sunday The Contemporary Museum 2411 Makiki Heights Drive 526-0232

Tom Knechtel

In this 20-year, mid-career survey of Knechtel's artwork, which includes 24 oil paintings and roughly 70 works on paper, one cannot help but think there is a good chance he could be a reincarnation of Hieronymus Bosch. With its painstaking fine detail and its cast of animals, bugs and humans connected in a theater of the absurd, Knechtel's dream-like, hallucinatory world draws us in to explore the depths of our bizarre fascination with his surrealistic images.

Of course, any artist who has the skill to draw as imaginatively and meticulously as Knechtel would dazzle a viewer. He didn't start drawing until he was in college (bachelor's degree in fine arts, 1974; master's degree in fine arts, 1976, California Institute of the Arts) and says he is insecure about his drawing skills.

"I decided very early on to set a template that my work would be intimate," he said in a recent docent walk-through at the museum. "It is based on illuminated manuscripts, Persian miniatures, children's book illustrations and toys. The scale of my work was very small."

His professors joked that he was the only artist who could carry his life's work around in one hand. His earlier works were primarily painted with gouache and watercolor on paper. The thin veils of color he applied to his work in paintings such as "A Congress of Wonders" (1986) — which includes putti, a black bee, a hanging floral pomander and a boy obscured in the bottom half of the painting — would take so long to dry between applications that the piece would take him a year to complete. Because of this, he learned patience early in his artistic career.

Knechtel also has a full-time job unrelated to his artistic pursuits. "I do it partly so I have padding," he said. "So I never have to go into my studio and make a decision about how I have to get something out of the studio so that I can pay my rent." He works on one piece at a time until it is finished, which could take up to a year and a half.

In viewing his work, it is easy to see how he journeys through what he creates. In 1986 he began painting in oils, which gave him more flexibility. Many of these oil paintings are based on his love of theater (puppet theater, circuses, kabuki, theatre du soleil, theater of the ridiculous, and kathakali theater from India). A "Servant of Two Masters" (1993-94), an oil on three wood panels and one unstretched canvas, is a perfect example: It has it all.

"It feels like I have a repertory company of actors," Knechtel said, "and I can employ them in any way that I want. I create the meaning of the picture based on how they participate in the tableaus I create." Masks are worn by humans and animals alike.

His "actors" are bears, birds, humans, insects, bats, horses, deer, rhinos, monkeys, dogs, snakes, fish, whales, roosters and mythological animals, including unicorns, griffins and dragons. Occasionally, words float through these lyrical scenes along with mushrooms, pumpkins, trees, flowers and fruit.

Knechtel's bizarre Roman Baroque architectural sets enhance his multidimensional scenes.

"Most people stand in front of a picture for 30 seconds," said Knechtel. "I like the idea of doing things that make you slam the brakes on. I don't want the picture to enter you quickly. I want you to enter the picture and for it to be a slow process."

In the self-portrait "A Middle-Aged Scheherazade" (1997, oil on canvas), Knechtel's love of a good story puts him in the center of the stage. "All the stories that you tell end up sticking to you," he said. "And you move through your life with all these stories cluttering your way." In his painting, the artist is depicted with two heads and four arms (inspired by his intoxication with India's deities). He is wearing a skirt tiered with small buildings, concession stands, tents, animals, lovemaking scenarios and flowers. Standing in a sketched-in area flooded with water, he has drawn in floating debris from the "garbage" of the stories from his skirt.

But, as in the story of Scheherazade, what is this compared to what he is going to tell you tomorrow? The painting is a contrast of rich detail and rough sketches. There are brush strokes in his work that appear to be made by a single-hair brush, and miniscule figures that would benefit from viewing with a magnifying glass.

"Some of the most fertile decisions in my work come when I think, 'Oh, that will be real stupid,' " he said. "Embarrassing myself, tripping over myself — all of those things — make the painting come to life when I am working on it. I try to keep myself reactive."

The poetic pastel drawings "Rhino" (1989) and "The Mouse as the Moon" (1985) show a softer, tender side of the artist, while drawings such as "Lion Devouring a Monkey" (1995) and "Two Goats" (1999) show a more ferocious side. In the later drawing, guts spew out of the goats' abdomens. Knechtel, a self-professed nonviolent man, does not perceive the guts in many of his art works as hideous.

"It is almost as if the stuff of mortality exploded out of the body," he says. "I am trying to talk to myself about mortality in some way that's graspable; that is a hard thing to do." A recent menagerie of impeccable drawings of animals, done in both pastel and egg ink on paper, appear in the last gallery room, illustrating the fragile connection between life and death.

In his paintings he tries to give himself a way to speak in different languages. Some sections are drawn carefully, some painted roughly, others cartoon-like or realistic. "I like the idea of all these pictorial languages rushing in together and talking all at once," he says. Likewise, his work can be either confrontational or humorous.

Knechtel has always loved farcical theater. Here is your chance. Suspend your disbelief and interact with him through the lush, erotic, idiosyncratic and fantastical images presented in this body of work.

Tony Berlant

Tony Berlant began working with scrap metal in the early 1960s, producing metal-collaged cubes. His recent work on exhibit is colossal by contrast. A few of the 11 pieces are 9 feet by 12. Entire walls of collaged tin, fixed by thousands of brad nails, give his work a quilted appearance. He is strict about the rules of collage and uses only found pieces or pressed metal that he has begun to manufacture in a factory. The surfaces of his work don't change. He doesn't paint over a piece of tin once it is in place. However, he is not adverse to collaging over it and will often change a picture many times if it isn't sold or published. Sometimes, he will rework the same collage for 10 years.

With his large studio filled with a palette of different colored and printed tin scraps (all organized by his assistant), Berlant snips and hammers the metal pieces to plywood surfaces.

"What is exciting is the process of making art," says Berlant. "It's really about the physicality, recreating the energy — the subject matter is secondary to that."

He hammers all day, every day. He gets cut by the sharp metal pieces and bruised by errant blows with the hammer.

Berlant's love of nature, particularly birds, materializes in his collages. "Delta"(2000) was inspired by watching a crane stand on a board in the surf. He became fascinated with the bird after spotting it while vacationing in the San Juan Islands of the Pacific Northwest with his family.

Landscapes with an ability to transform into the extraordinary include Joshua trees that are made from scraps of metal imprinted with James Dean's hair in "Joshua Trees" (2001), as well as Lucille Ball's hair, shoulders and facial features.

Swirling lavender and blue clouds, human tree elements and the (according to Berlant) mysterious appearance of a beloved and departed cat in one collage shift his art from abstract to the abstracted.

In his nonchalant way, Berlant takes something, which requires enormous physical energy pieced together by all the colorful scraps found along the way, into a more spiritual realm.