Secret lives

PHOTO by VINCENT E. SOLIZ

Ristorante DaVinci, atop a hangar at Long Beach Airport, is a marvelously prosperous-feeling place, all 20-foot, rounded windows under a two-story ceiling. It’s even got a columned rotunda in the middle of the restaurant floor. Really, I wouldn’t be surprised if Olivia Newton-John and her rolling-skating muses showed up and streaked the place.

But down a hallway, and behind a gilded mirror, daVinci’s management has given over a long, wide room as a gallery to one of its staff, who’s brought in friends and compatriots to show somewhat secret art. Far from being posh and lush like the restaurant itself, the gallery—Studio Circa—is almost a garret. It’s got the same wonderful architecture, minus the sumptuous treatments and changing LED screens. It’s a working class space with a downtown feel. It’s real Long Beach to daVinci’s decadent Dubai.

“X-Artica” at Studio Circa feels like a student show, or a co-op show. There is no theme, either in media or subject matter. There is only the common goal of taking delight in covering canvases, whether with fuzzy, Impressionistic photo giclees, abstract splotches, or Dali-ish little melt-scapes. The works are modest, and fun, and stupidly well-priced, and they have as little to do with each other as Republicans and heterosexual sex.

It’s hard to square the work with the space; one would assume daVinci’s owners would call for something more like what they show at Newport’s Bayside restaurant, all moody decorative landscapes gilded with sunshine of real gold leaf. But here is work from real Long Beachers, including those who bring to table your venison and your wine. It seems terribly subversive for restaurant management to admit its help has off-hours lives.

And what is there to see every Friday and Saturday night while enjoying your $50 flight? Well, through November, at least, there is Vincent E. Soliz’s photo canvas of a girl in a bustier. She stands in profile, her head turned coquettishly to us. She may be wearing bunny ears. She is very like a Manet. There is Soliz’s portrait of a tall, weeping tree, almost like the sycamores of Guy Rose (but a photo!). There are bleeding stumps in gray and crimson. There is an antler on black scratchboard, and what I’m sure are Liezel Rubin’s mustached women, though Rubin is not on the price list. There are Paul Dragomir’s small jewels of tall trees in cityscapes, a 1960 kind of view of the world—Progress!—though with (at least judging from watching Mad Men) less office drunkenness and raping of secretaries. They come in blue and lime, slate and cotton, and I would like to own some.

There are Ele Cold’s wonderful statues—a cold-cast iron embedded into plastic—though when I went back a second time, his tiny man with Giacometti hands, hanging in a chain from the ceiling, was gone. There are works with titles like Weeping Blossoms and Green Mist and Two White Birds (Dragomir); Good Little Rabbit, Help You to Hurt Me and Teeth Like Nails (Cold); and A Journey Through the Land of Conspicuous Intentions (Adreanna C. Lakovidis). While the works on the walls aren’t numbered in correspondence to the (ridiculously reasonable) price list, I have a feeling—don’t you?—that Conspicuous Intentions was the one with the melting rock and egg boulder blossoming into a giant rose while a naked woman crawled over water toward it and someone else hung in the sky.

It makes sense in a nonsensical way, which is as it should be. This is art. If it’s sense and reason you want, look to the black sky outside the slanted windows, where the lights of Long Beach hang in the sky—or, to be precise, the lights of Signal Hill.

“X-ARTICA” AT STUDIO CIRCA | RISTORANTE DAVINCI | 2801 E SPRING ST | LONG BEACH 90806 | DAVINCILB.COM | 562.685.8111 | FRI-SAT 7-10PM | THROUGH NOVEMBER 30

Tags: art, dali, long beach airport, ristorante davinci, x-artica