The Thomas Babeor Gallery in La Jolla...

The Thomas Babeor Gallery in La Jolla (7470 Girard Ave.) opened its fall season with an exhibit of new works by classic Los Angeles artist Billy Al Bengston.

All are semiabstract watercolors of gardens, often viewed through the grids of window frames, whose rectilinearity contrasts with the sinuous plant forms long identified with Bengston--exotic blossoms, vines, palm trees, bamboo--in relief against luscious fields of sea and sky. Occasionally the silhouette of a wary lizard or a playful dog appear, and often an airplane in the distance, suggesting escape either into or away from sensual indulgence.

These new watercolors are very much like those Babeor exhibited last year to open the 1985 season. Although their titles record the passage of months, the images seem changeless in an eternity of voluptuousness.

Bengston, long a master of his metier, seems to produce these bagatelles with ease. Still, these exercises in virtuosity intimate the pleasures of the senses celebrated by poets and visual artists since antiquity.

Babeor’s inner gallery contains, as it always does, a number of treasures, including an unusually ominous painting by Peter Alexander. He is as much of a voluptuary as Bengston, but this work, entitled “Sarabhai,” suggests an oppressive rain forest, a site for jungle warfare.

Barbara Weldon’s abstract watercolor is equally somber, but characteristically beautiful.

Eric Orr’s “Edge of Light “ is an exceptionally beautiful that equivocates between sensual and mystical. A wall relief, it is nothing more than a vertical gold field (perhaps 30 x 8 inches) with a razor-thin, vertical line of intensely white light at its center. With these minimal symbolic means, Orr evokes fundamental concerns of our civilization--flesh and spirit, the earth and the universe, wealth and glory.

The exhibit continues through Oct. 11.

The works of a young Los Angeles artist are on view at the Natalie Bush Gallery (908 E St.). Beginning with tree limbs and stumps, and adding chicken wire, Japanese rice paper, industrial lacquer and other materials, sculptor Daniel Martinez, 29, makes theatrical grotesques that resemble monsters that have escaped from a nightmare.

“My Love Wants to Be a Terrorist” is a fanged, horned and winged silver dwarf carrying a green, horse-faced companion with female breasts and a fish’s tail; “The Age of Reconciliation, Pray You Die,” is a terrifying, larger than human-size black, insect-like creature with orange rope hair. “In Search of Truth,” in contrast, appears almost cordial: an elegant, large lizard-like form with silver scales (made using tacks), a growth of wiry hair along the spine and an open green wire head.

Ironically entitled as a group “Forces of Enlightenment,” Martinez’ sculptures are not expressions of the humanistic philosophy of the 18th Century. They express the reality of what the artist perceives as his “existence and survival in an extremely repressive society” and his involvement “in an active investigation of contemporary urban life.”

Martinez is an active artist who has worked as well with installation, performance and holography. His monsters are the progeny of Hollywood distantly related to those of Goya and Bosch.

The exhibit continues through Oct. 18.

The San Diego Watercolor Society’s “1986 International Exhibition” is on view at Grossmont College Art Gallery (8800 Grossmont College Drive) in El Cajon.

Watercolor seems by its very nature to be a conservative medium, and most of the 92 works exhibited (out of 1,310 slide entries from 719 artists) are very traditional images--seascapes, landscapes, still lifes and relatively few abstractions. No work evinces the influence of the 1980s, of artists like Jennifer Bartlett and Francesco Clemente, for example. Nevertheless, there are works of great beauty in the exhibit.

Sharon Maczko’s “Evening” (Bedroom Series), this year’s San Diego Museum of Art Purchase Selection, is a radiant work of art, a tour de force of verisimilitude with its transparencies, reflections and suggestions of texture done from life rather than from a photograph.

The exhibit continues at the museum through Sept. 29.