AT THE GALLERIES:Magic in bronze

When artists innovate, it usually involves either using traditional materials in original ways or using original materials in traditional ways.

Real iconoclasts, like Picasso, did both. He was one of the inventors of cubism in oil paint and also created the first collages with the nearly heretical act of pasting newspaper scraps onto his canvases.

Nathan Fischer, whose work is currently on view at Diana Ferrone Gallery (1951 So. Coast Highway), does something he calls “patina on bronze” (or sometimes “bronze panel”).

When I first saw them, my immediate reaction was puzzlement.

Fischer’s background is in metal working at a foundry that served artists, the Monterey Sculpture Center.

He began doing his own sculptures, and then began to create what I can only describe as a “painting” using the techniques of metalworking. It reminded me, in fact, of methods sometimes used by jewelers on a smaller scale.

The panels are canvas-like, in the sense that they stand off the wall in the same way a deep canvas would. Seen from behind, they are shallow, soldered boxes.

But from the front, they are abstract landscapes, or simple abstract forms.

They are created, in Fischer’s words, by “welding, hammering and grinding,” and the colors are created by working with chemical reactions on the metal’s surface.

“Burning Sea” (20 x 32) seems typical of the landscapes.

Washed areas of color and a kind of cross-hatching in the surface combine to create a sense of depth.

The panel has a strong sense of mystery, a vision of haze over a calm ocean.

The amazing thing about these landscapes is the strong representational accuracy.

You don’t need to read the title to know this is a burning sea.

Fischer seems to have captured the basic essence of landscape in metal, something surprising and elemental.

This is all the more impressive because of the extremely limited range of color the artist has to work with.

Not surprisingly, they are golds and verdigris, umbers and rusts, steel blues.

But Fischer has found a way to use grinding to create space and form on the panel, deep skies and vanishing points.

So there is a certain amount of repetition in the landscapes, the same horizon line crossing the bottom third of the composition, the same range of bronzes. All artists repeat when they have discovered something new, but the trick is to make it not so much repetition as variation on a theme.

There is amazing variation if you look at “Burning Sea” and “Phantom Valley” (32 x 40) side by side.

For one thing, you can be staring at the aptly named “Phantom Valley” for quite some time before you realize there are hills in the background.

It was this panel that made me realize I had no idea how the artist accomplished these effects. I can guess, of course: different coarseness on the grinder, washing chemical acids in certain ways, that sort of thing. But this seemed almost magical.

Interestingly, this effect is totally lost in the photo reproductions of it.

The hills are there, clear and distinct, as if painted. But in person, they emerge and disappear, as if the quality of the light is changing.

Come to think of it, it is. No angle on the surface is the same, so the way light would bounce off the tiny little grinding lines would also shift.

In some places, the effect is almost like water color, bleeding down into the metal. This is enhanced by the way Fischer finishes the surfaces in a glossy medium, not quite glass, nothing like an enamel. It partially reflects and mirrors, but you still see the subtle textures.

Using texture to suggest form and shape color is a painter’s technique. It’s very impressive in Fischer’s landscapes, but you would think this would naturally lend itself to creating geometrical forms (something you sometimes see in kitschy, mass produced metal work).

At the time I visited the gallery, new panels were still being delivered by the artist. There was only one pure abstraction, “Three Degrees” (32 x 32). It is a set of three circles placed in a fascinating composition, the shapes floating off the canvas, broken by its square shape. The only whole circle is golden, and the polish in the metal creates the illusion of a ring resolving itself out from empty space.

Taken as a whole, it’s clear that Nathan Fischer has taken the limitations of his chosen medium and turned them into tools for innovation. He has transformed a limit into restraint, and produced works of minimalist grace.