Combining Art With a Cut and a Blow Dry

Art viewing at Bigoudi International is a strange experience, no matter what is on display. The venue has nobly ushered in rewarding artworks--mostly from Latin America--in an ample space on Ventura Boulevard in Woodland Hills.

But the plain fact remains: It’s a salon. Not in the 19th-century European sense, but in the beauty sense. Hair is being done here. The smell of make-over is in the air. Nevertheless, Bigoudi is an often inspiring stop on the map of Valley art spaces.

Currently, the work on display is by Rafael Serrano, a Cuban-born artist now living in Los Angeles. Befitting a salon doubling as a gallery, his semiabstract art is suitably innocuous on the surface, but rich with allusions on closer inspection. These are large, life-size pieces, but gentle-spirited enough to be discreet, almost fading into the background.

In Serrano’s spare compositions, images and impressions float by in ambiguous space like scattered bits of reality drifting by in the unconscious. In one painting, goblets and mustache-like patterns are laid sparsely atop an earthy-colored background. Elsewhere, three-dimensional elements--mosaic-like ceramic bits or plates--enter the pictures. Some surfaces have the rough, three-dimensional quality of plaster.

Serrano favors curving lines and shapes that suggest human anatomy, often female, but he creates them with the eye of an abstractionist. A giant head, fashioned from mosaic-like shards of ceramic attached to the canvas, sits below a sensuous androgynous figure, like a scenario from a sexually oriented dream.

A painting with crumpled airplanes in flight has a compelling tension, with forms and lines fighting for control, and the odd appearance of what looks like a magnified human hair. In another, a bull’s strength has been compromised by the stab of a sword, a realistic image in surreal juxtaposition with abstract designs overhead.

In Serrano’s art, nothing is as simple as it might appear at a casual glance. Yet it’s not all careless or willy-nilly. He manages to carve out a poetic path between his irrational connections, inviting us into a mysterious realm.

* Rafael Serrano, through February at Bigoudi International Gallery, 21720 Ventura Blvd. in Woodland Hills. (818) 887-3627.

*

Frontier Visions: Part of the considerable appeal of “Photographing Montana, 1894-1928: The World of Evelyn Cameron,” now at the Autry Museum, stems from the circumstances of the photographer’s life and work. Cameron was born into a comfortable social strata in England, but found a happier home when she and her new husband moved to the big-sky world of the Montana plains in 1894.

There, she took up photography for pleasure and profit. Over the next three decades, Cameron chronicled an American landscape that seems like another world to us now. Her refinement and intelligence served her well in the land of cowboys, which she obviously found intriguing.

In her photographic account, this stretch of Montana appears as a wide, arid frontier, sparsely dotted with architecture of the most rudimentary sort. Towns have little more than a few foursquare structures, and one shot depicts a homesteading couple in front of a shack barely larger than an outhouse. A congregation of German Lutherans poses before a newly finished chapel, with all the enthusiasm of a funeral throng.

These frontier folks, like their architecture, appear simple and sturdy, ready to take on the rigors of a new life. They appear with stoic composure in an era when posing before a lens was still serious business. Sober expressions are the rule, even at a wedding.

Cameron’s portrait work may have been a professional duty at the time, but in hindsight approaches the domain of art photography. One “flawed” portrait of two children--one child’s restlessness has made him out of focus--assumes the character of a decisive moment captured on film, a little essay on the fleeting nature of time and youth.

One fascinating image, graced with enigmatic layers of light and shadow, finds Evelyn’s husband, Ewen, standing proudly by a mounted swan, a beautiful bird that is quite white and quite dead. Shortly after the shot was taken, Ewen himself died. Life went on. And her dryly scintillating photographs offer us a window on that lost time.

* “Photographing Montana, 1894-1928: The World of Evelyn Cameron,” through March 2 at the Autry Museum, 4700 Western Heritage Way in Griffith Park. Open 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesday-Sunday. Call (213) 667-2000.