The Subtle Colors of Individuality

To provocative and occasionally frustrating effect, “Nancy Picot Riegelman: Recent Works on Paper” navigates the considerable gulf between abstract forms of representation and the direct immediacy associated with performance and body art.

On view at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Riegelman’s deceptively simple yet conceptually dense works function like maps that guide viewers across the artist’s own body while charting her experience of physical sensation. The exhibition consists of 21 monotype prints and was organized by the late Bruce Davis, curator of prints and drawings, and carried out by senior curator Victor Carlson and curatorial assistant Sharon Goodman.

Riegelman’s prints look like large-scale versions of the standardized color palette strips found in paint stores or Pantone color-matching guides. Made with the assistance of master printer John Greco, each work consists of five stacked rectangular bands or bars, whose placement on a sheet of paper (60 inches tall by 22 inches, approximately the size of the artist herself) corresponds to the location of Riegelman’s eyes, mouth, heart, wrists and hips.

From a distance, the works appear exactly alike save for variations in their color palettes, which capture Southern California’s light on particular days throughout the year. Riegelman chooses a range of soft, muted hues that, as your eyes traverse the range of prints, reflects the annual passage of seasons: creamy beige, rose, salmon and dusky mauve, pale yellowish greens and mustard yellows.

Although these works implicitly recall the “de-materialized,” light-based installations of California Light & Space artists like James Turrell, Riegelman’s flatly two-dimensional distillations of light and color do not carve out space in a physical sense. Instead, Riegelman aims to depict intimate physical phenomena in abstract terms, without resorting to words or images.

Drawing closer, you notice that the artist has drawn a series of whisper-thin pencil lines around or through most of the horizontal bands. These autographic gestures--some lines are solid, some broken at intervals, others form delicate crosshatching patterns--directly record sensations felt in the artist’s eyes, chest, fingers, hips, even her “random thoughts.” We are never able to discern, however, exactly what kind of physical movement is occurring, for how long or with what degree of intensity.

Each work is titled according to the physical experience it represents, such as “Beating of the Heart/Eyesight,” a work dated April 8, 1997. The prints have been framed in groups of three and are arranged across three walls of the gallery in roughly chronological order, from Nov. 3, 1996, to Jan. 5, 1998.

Riegelman’s spare abstractions appear rigidly systematic but are in fact highly arbitrary and intuitive. Their geometric, stacked compositions bring to mind the columnar arrangement of rectangular boxes in sculptor Donald Judd’s 1960s wall reliefs.

There are important differences, however. Riegelman’s works refer to phenomena existing outside the art object itself. With not a little irony, she has transformed two classic Minimalist icons--the rectangle and the column--into a flat surface upon which she records her own personal experience. Judd, or any other self-respecting Minimalist artist, would have found such autobiographical impulses unthinkable.

In contrast to the expansive gestural flourishes of Abstract Expressionists like Jackson Pollock or Willem de Kooning, Riegelman’s expressive content is limited to a series of anorexic pencil lines that record minute physical fluctuations.

Yet, the longer one studies them, the more these lines seem to take on a life of their own. Like musical bars, they evoke symphonies of breath and heartbeat. They also lead us to reflect on the ways in which life-signs are recorded or otherwise abstractly represented through EKG machines, polygraph tests and other technologies that measure--and attempt to master--the immeasurable through bodily experiences.

Although she works within the charged arena inhabited by provocative feminist performance artists like Karen Finley or the late Hannah Wilke, Riegelman’s approach is coolly restrained. Her private “performance” is publicly enacted only through trace marks. Whereas Finley and Wilke used nudity, confrontation and other “shocking” tactics to break down the comfortable distance between artist and audience, Riegelman reminds us that that gap can never be fully eradicated.

Unfortunately, she also runs the risk of alienating some viewers who, put off by the somewhat bland appearance and cryptic nature of her prints, may not spend more than five minutes with them.

Those who do, however, will be amply rewarded. Riegelman’s perplexing color bands ask questions rather than provide answers, forcing the viewer to rely on intuition. We might find ourselves trying to re-create the artist’s original movements, retracing her notations with our eyes or breathing in time to her rhythmic pencil marks.

Riegelman invites us to contemplate one of life’s enduring mysteries: What does it feel like to inhabit someone else’s skin? To breach the distance--at once infinitely vast and enticingly near--between our own experience and that of other people?

* “Nancy Picot Riegelman: Recent Works on Paper,” Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles, (323) 857-6000, through May 31. Museum hours are Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays, noon to 8 p.m.; Fridays, noon to 9 p.m.; Saturdays and Sundays, 11 a.m. to 8 p.m.; closed Wednesdays.