‘RELATIONSHIPS’ : 4 ARTISTS AS PEOPLE WATCHERS

All visual art is involved with relationships--of one color to another, a surface to a form, an object to its environment. But these are formal correspondences, not the messy human ones portrayed in a current exhibition simply titled “Relationships.”

At the Long Beach Museum of Art, where new director Josine Ianco-Starrels has gathered the work of four accomplished Los Angeles artists, we find sweet embraces, tense distances, silent breakfasts and neurotic agitation. Not surprisingly, most of these are enacted by couples or pairs of people.

When Leo Robinson paints a lone woman in “Visitation,” she carries on a telephone conversation with one person while looking abruptly to the side, as if hearing the approach of another. A woman with her back to us in “Smoke” has retreated for a cigarette, but we assume that she is fretting about some rocky “relationship.”

While much of Robinson’s work examines the distances between people--in friendly living rooms or gardens--his newest painting has a furtive couple squeezed into a rowboat that’s crossing a wide expanse of water. He stares straight ahead as he rows; she keeps watch over her shoulder. There’s psychological steam in that boat, suggesting internal trouble, but there’s also a mystery about what--or if--they are fleeing. None too happily alone together, the pair seem to be putting real space between themselves and another problem.

Boats also figure in Joyce Treiman’s new paintings. Ocean liners cruise into the seas that serve as backdrops for sticky relationships, appearing as symbols of deliverance or as a serene counterpoint to the agitated people who thrash out their insecurities and feelings of alienation in the foreground.

Among a group of small oils from 1986, a “Joker” needles Treiman about the absurdity of life in a couple of paintings that include her image, while a “Stranger” lends an air of loneliness. In “The Yellow Lampshade,” a vintage 1968-69 painting, we find Treiman skewering the anxieties of a knobby-kneed girl, watched by a chubby fellow who means to be friendly but appears malevolent.

All four artists can be called expressionists, insofar as they emphasize an unsettling emotional quality, but none of them distorts form to the degree the term usually signifies. They can as easily be labeled realists who have a distinctive slant on the life they see around them. Treiman has mingled her contemporary observations with knowledge of art history, often reworking historical themes or including images of past artists. Robinson has tied into his ethnic background by employing a monkey from a street poem.

Eileen Cowin, on the other hand, is a child of the media age who photographs “docu-dramas” of her family. Originally these domestic scenes seemed arch, self-centered and so theatrically spoofy that their cleverness undercut their content. Recent works are far more mature and subliminally affecting.

An elderly couple figures most prominently in the group of large black-and-white prints at Long Beach. (Made in 1985, they were shown last year at the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art.) We find them in the bedroom, lost in their own thoughts or observing each other as they seem to embody both the weight and the comfort of age. At breakfast, in their bathrobes, they casually carry out elaborately layered activities.

A diptych of younger couples--with the men comforting distressed women--grabs its audience with high-pitched drama, but the pictures of older people glide silently and slowly, scanning the dailiness of their lives and leaving viewers free to invent their own interpretations of a relationship that appears to have weathered several decades.

Dan McCleary seems to be the odd man out in this show, simply because his work looks so mellow. While Treiman and Robinson accentuate human disturbances with choppy brush strokes in variegated color and Cowin gives them the starkly “serious” impact of black-and-white documentation, McCleary paints sturdy people with soft edges. Reduced to a few shapes on plain backgrounds, they nonetheless radiate feeling.

An accused man in “The Crime” is devastated, while dancing couples are warmly affectionate. Originally known for reinterpreting movie stills and infusing his work with nostalgia, McCleary seems to have broadened his range of subject matter and emotion as he has become a more assured painter.

The shows runs through May 17.