Charles (or Chuck) Arnoldi has been a mainstay in Los Angeles art since the early 1970s, proposing a kind of material grittiness that is, if anything, the inverse of the finely tooled polish practiced by his finish/fetish friends. Arnoldi is, in fact, every bit as deft a manager of heavy-duty, long-haul substance as his peers, but capitalizes on the raw sensuality of stuff — hewn wood, acrylic slashes and blobs, tendrilous webs of painted wood or metal, and the like — to inflect his almost architecturally wrought compositions with heft and pathos.

Arnoldi is not alone in refiguring finish/fetish into such material abstraction, but he is one of the most powerful and enduring, able to work on several platforms, formats, and scales at once to answer the myriad formal challenges he has been setting himself for almost half a century. This selection of work is drawn from the collection of one of the artist’s most devoted collectors, Jordan D. Schnitzer, scion of the leading “art family” in Portland, Oregon, and the survey has been gracefully assembled by former Portland Museum of Art curator Bruce Guenther (whose connection to Arnoldi goes back to Guenther’s days at the Orange County Museum). It’s practically a primer in Arnoldi art, hitting all his strengths with major examples, even of the artist’s equally persuasive prints, monotypes, and other works on paper.

All that’s missing is Arnoldi’s quirky side; his frequent reversions to small-scale sculpture, for instance, are under-represented, and the humor that gives such variety to Arnoldi’s work on canvas comes to the surface less often than one might prefer. It’s not a safe selection — Arnoldi relies on formula not as dictate, but as position, to be altered and even attacked at will — but it is a sober one. Guenther, and perhaps Schnitzer, have responded, at least here, to the monumental and even tragic in Arnoldi’s aesthetic. In showing how Arnoldi transcends the clever, however, the show gives rather short shrift to his wit. It’s there, hiding in the cracks, keep an eye out for it.

Charles Arnoldi: Four Decades
Fisher Museum of Art
University of Southern California
Through April 4, 2020