ART / Cathy Curtis : Artist Ron Rizk’s Work Is the Result of More Than Just a Useful Skill

Those of us who can’t even draw well enough to play Pictionary may harbor a secret wish that we could dazzle people with an impromptu likeness sketched on a restaurant napkin or paint a still life that actually looked good enough to eat.

Actually, the ability to render realistic-looking objects is not a pre-eminent goal in contemporary art; it’s just a useful skill, like knowing how to install carburetors or do long division in your head. True artfulness--the kind that distinguishes a diligent hack from someone with an original perspective on the world--lies elsewhere.

Los Angeles artist Ron Rizk, whose work from the late 1970s and ‘80s is on view through May 14 at the Laguna Art Museum, cleverly manages to have it both ways.

In the early ‘70s he made the leap from geometric abstraction to precise little still lifes on wood panels, in which every detail, down to the shadows cast by straight pins and minute “cracks” in paint, is painted with super-fussy accuracy.

For many viewers, this demonstration of skill is a small miracle. But if you think that’s all Rizk’s paintings are about, you’re missing the point.

The tableaux the artist paints are self-sufficient worlds--like the stage sets of an eccentric inventor--that contain gently weathered objects: old toys, old tools, old postcards, peeling walls. But something more insidious is at work here than simple nostalgia. The little stories Rizk tells are infused with an oddball wit that requires some mental gymnastics from the viewer.

It’s no coincidence that the artistic forbears whom Rizk credits (in an exhibition catalogue note) are a couple of American originals, 19th-Century still-life painters John Frederick Peto and John Haberle, who both had sly agendas that veered off the straight-and-narrow path of duplicating the look of real objects.

Peto also gave his objects (which were often old books) softened, mellowed colors and slightly blurred edges, a look that Rizk also pursues in many of his works and which seems linked to his abstract paintings.

Rizk’s early still lifes are compositionally quite simple, and the objects exist in a very thin layer of space directly in front of the picture plane. But even while he was still figuring out how to put his own stamp on the still-life genre, he wandered into such intriguing subject matter as the workings of chance (in “Six Tops in Space,” the toys have rolled this way and that in the shallow space) and the nature of absurdity (like the wildly awkward holes cut out of the wall to accommodate the arms of an unseen apple-chopper in “Everyday Technology’).

But the more recent paintings are, with a few exceptions, the richest. (Rizk gets too cute for comfort in a handful of these, like “Imposters in the Aquarium” and “Misfortune at the Drawbridge: A Painting for Owen.”)

In “Easy Downgrade,” from 1986, meticulously painted wood shavings curl against a black background--the debris created by an old planing tool that has stripped a portion of the peeling blue paint on a piece of wood down to a clean blond finish. On tacked-up old postcards painted into the scene, trains puff across the landscape.

The fun lies in picking up on the various senses of the word “downgrade”: the slope of the railroad tracks, the fact that steam trains have been superseded by the diesel variety, the way the plane has revamped the “grade” of the piece of wood. The shavings created by the tool also just happen to be thrown off at the same angle at the smoke of the train, creating a bizarre parallel between the two objects.

In the catalogue essay, San Diego Union art critic Robert L. Pincus takes this idea a step further. He sees the planing tool as another type of vehicle: “a kind of sled, moving on a shelf that tilts at a subtle incline.”

Other works by Rizk offer a kind of mute appeal that resists pigeonholing.

In “Audition,” from 1988, a big, oddly sexless face listens to a tube that pokes through the wall into another room, where it is attached to a horn. The room also contains another, more primitive-looking horn and a funnel on a shelf; through a window a springy green landscape is visible. The scene has a curious poignancy because the figure is so cut off from the world, relying on second-hand transmission of aural information and lacking any visual data at all.

Some paintings seem to require the viewer to search out tiny or out-of-the-way images in order to understand the real subject.

For example, “One Way Trip” (also from 1988) is an image of a toy marble chute with an empty score-pad and pen. There are also images of a man in an elaborate hat, a woman in African tribal headgear and a tiny, tiny lumpy ball on a black background. Could this be the Earth? If so, perhaps the “one-way trip” Rizk is alluding to is human life and, more specifically, the life of a planet increasingly under attack from anti-environmental forces.

But perhaps the most puzzling aspects of the paintings, overall, are the little profiled portraits of odd-looking fellows in medieval dress that can be found on tacked-up cards within the settings of many of the paintings. Perhaps these are surrogates for the artist himself, who never lets the viewer forget that his pun-devising, contraption-controlling presence is the controlling force behind the quirky images.

“Decoys and Deceptions: The Paintings of Ron Rizk 1978-1986” remains on view through May 14 at the Laguna Art Museum, 307 Cliff Drive, Laguna Beach. Hours are 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday. Admission is $2 general, $1 for children and seniors. Information: (714) 494-6531.