THE VALLEY

Until recently, Jerry McGrath’s photographs had been primarily concerned with color theory and obtuse allusions to early 20th-Century art history.

Combining household items and geometric shapes with natural elements such as grass and leaves, McGrath created monochromatic still lifes that fused the organic properties of his materials with such idealistic abstract philosophies as Constructivism or Suprematism. His new work retains many of these elements but they have been placed in the wider context of dream archetypes and the creation myth of Adam and Eve: a form of techno-modernism meets magic and ritual.

McGrath’s self-consciously staged scenarios in vibrant, larger-than-life colors are set against darkened studio backgrounds, much like a Symbolist theater of the absurd. A nude Adam and a New-Wavish Eve, for example, are separated by television screens, globes, a Red Skelton-like clown portrait, and various bric-a-brac--symbolic representations of animus and anima (or fallen man?) linked by enigmatic symbols of divine comedy and received information. This is a world of metaphor and significance run rampant, as if the camera, habitually an instrument of “truth” and realism, were yet one more cohort within a conspiracy of mystification.

Whereas McGrath’s strategy of overkill successfully draws attention to the manipulative power of visual language, Ernest Velardi’s Surrealist paintings merely accentuate its worst vices. His tightly cropped, somewhat geometric dreamscapes draw heavily upon Magritte’s juxtapositions of seemingly unconnected images, in particular the latter’s “On the Threshold of Liberty.” Whereas Magritte was primarily concerned with exploiting the gap between language and seeing, Velardi’s mosaic of childhood memories--grid-like cupboards, windows, Greek columns, pianos and clocks--merely sets up a hermetic world that has more in common with the cliches of slick advertising imagery than creating an autobiography through archetypes and complexes. (Orlando Gallery, 14553 Ventura Blvd., to March 29.)