ART REVIEWS : One-Dimensional Platinum Prints

Rei Taka’s platinum prints at Paul Kopeikin Gallery gracefully refer to numerous movements from modern art history. The San Diego-based photographer competently deploys, in refined compositions, elements of collage, still-life, Romanticism, abstraction and a touch of Surrealism. Historical references, however, are not the subject of her works. Taka’s photographs recycle styles and techniques solely for the purpose of design.

Oddly shaped bottles, artfully positioned colanders, glass plates arranged to reflect light and cast shadows, as well as angled tabletops, frame-less mirrors and implied windowpanes are the actors in her self-consciously plotless dramas. At their best, Taka’s images seem to give substance to a weightless world forgotten by time. Their relentlessly artificial nature intensifies the sense that they glimpse a world exclusively made up of moments of perfection.

If this impression gives Taka’s photographs their power, it also leads to their shortcomings. To fill the vacuum created when history and narrative are purged from the picture, her work compensates with an overzealous pursuit of pure design. The photographs depict an impressive array of meticulously engineered lighting effects, sensuous surface textures and richly subtle formal relationships. Nevertheless, they remain bland and uninteresting--not quite formulaic, but hollow and uninspired. These qualities directly result from their refusal to aspire to anything more than visual pleasantness. For example, the objects in Taka’s images are positioned where they are because that’s where they look best. Other considerations simply do not apply.

It would be a mistake to call these works formalist. Formalism maintains that an essential relationship exists between a work’s form and its content. Taka’s photographs replace this difficult dialogue with one-dimensional designs whose pleasant effects are tasteful but empty.

* Paul Kopeikin Gallery, 964 N. La Brea Ave., (213) 876-7033, through Sept. 16. Closed Sundays and Mondays.