ART REVIEW : MOSLEY’S WORKS A TRUE CELEBRATION OF SENSES

The exhibit of mixed-media works by Bill Mosley at the Anuska Gallery (2400 Kettner Blvd.) is an auspicious opening show for the fall season. Anuska Smith got the jump on the other downtown galleries, which have yet to inaugurate their seasons, and Mosley’s works have a celebratory quality. They are tributes to all the senses.

Mosley, practically a native of San Diego, studied art at UC San Diego, where he received both a bachelor’s degree and a master of fine arts. As an instructor at Grossmont College he seems to have inspired some of the better students there. Works by several of them are now at the Standard Brands Corner Gallery (939 16th St.).

Mosley’s drawings at the Anuska Gallery convey a Latin sense of voluptuousness in which he seems to have immersed himself during a recent sojourn in Venezuela. Working with chalk pastels on paper, he has made partially abstract and realistic images of urban life in the tropics--including San Diego. The exceptionally large scale and dense compositions are life-size illusions of environments that entice you to enter them.

No other work more convincingly epitomizes Mosley’s seductive powers than “Tambores” (1986), a 4-by-9-foot horizontal drawing in which three nude women, represented referentially rather than realistically, dance frenetically in a wildly gestural field. Only the writhing, garishly hued torsos of the cropped figures, appear. A fourth figure, probably male, appears submerged beyond the plane of surface activity. At the far left appears the suggestion of a phallus and at the far right, a vagina.

The artist was inspired by women who, dancing extraordinarily complex patterns to broken rhythms at a breathtaking tempo, exchange a series of male partners until they select one for the evening. An emphatically erotic work, it conveys a sense of art-making itself as a vigorous physical act.

“Chirimena Figure” (1985), although simpler in composition--a black man carrying a tray of empanadas and striding across a field of hot sand, cool sea and sky--also conveys palpable energy. The detailed sensitivity of the man’s features, quizzical and ambiguous, contrasts with the purposeful thrusting of his limbs, which are kinetically abstract rather than statically realistic.

In two large drawing depicting plaza life, Mosley effectively conveys the pleasures of contrasts of temperature and the satisfactions of gregariousness.

Closer to home are two large drawings (7 by 5 feet) of the intersection of Kettner Street and Broadway, with images of the now-destroyed bowling alley and its towering sign that was for decades one of the rare architecturally interesting features of the area. In Mosely’s works, our city looks very glamorous and even passionate.