Exhibit of Artist’s Work Proves Surrealism’s Alive and Well

Unlike most other “isms” of early 20th-Century art, surrealism has proved to be inexhaustible. An approach rather than a single visual style, surrealism calls for moving beyond the rational, conscious world into the realm of dreams and the unfettered imagination, a tenet that has strongly flavored much contemporary work.

Add Schlechter Duvall, a little-known painter and poet born in Indonesia and now living in Iowa, to the list of artists practicing the automatism and freedom that Andre Breton began preaching in the 1920s.

“The Magic of the Round,” the title of Duvall’s exhibition at the new Oneiros Gallery (711 8th Ave.), also heads one of his poems of 20 years ago, in which his surrealist sensibility reveals itself. The round, he writes, “at once can be/four and seven/circle, triangle, and square/and likewise/a horse and a flower.”

Similarly, the surfaces of Duvall’s watercolors and oils (from 1968 to the present) flutter with disjunctive meanings. Lines flow freely--automatically, in surrealist verbiage--from framing non-associational fields of color to articulating the sinuous contour of a woman’s waist.

Duvall relishes the seductive vagueness of dreams, though recognizable forms appear sporadically to anchor his images to the known world. Birds and fish float freely within these tapestries of inconclusive shapes and memories. Images of eyes also recur, and the gaze becomes equated with desire as repeated suggestions of the female body surface to satisfy it.

Elsewhere, corners and arches, recesses and slots, planes and shadows mingle in Duvall’s uninhibited flow of imagery. Though disobedient of any logical order, the shapes cohere visually in spirited compositions hinting that Duvall couldn’t truly “unlearn” all that had burdened him in art school.

Like the dreams and imaginings that inspire them, Duvall’s paintings are most provocative when least concrete, when his shapes remain ciphers of a personal code, fresh and not yet weakened by the grip of familiarity and stylization.

The show continues through May 20.

Few familiar names populate the spot where social commentary and the medium of ceramics intersect. Robert Arneson and Viola Frey are there, with their bold, demanding and highly acclaimed work.

Their credibility in the art world at large suggests that ceramic art, to be taken seriously as a bearer of social or political meaning, must distance itself from its traditional decorative and functional roles.

In “Social Messages: The Late Nineteen Eighties,” at the Wita Gardiner Gallery (535 4th Ave.) through May 14, guest curator Elaine Levin has gathered a group of ceramicists with concerns, among others, “for the environment, for the effects of genetic engineering, for the ultimate disaster, nuclear war.”

Of the eight artists represented, most choose not to challenge the beauty barrier but instead couch their social commentary within highly refined surfaces. Whether as a consequence of this or other missteps, technical prowess tends to swallow and all but obliterate the artists’ statements.

Eve Watts’ “Domestic Disasters,” for instance, succumb to the hollow cuteness of miniature dollhouses; Marilyn Lysohir’s “The Dark Side of Dazzle” series barely convinces that the glitzy social skin harbors a dark side; and Victor Spinski’s illusionistic works make harmless jabs at America’s cultural agenda.

Though oriented more toward personal aspects of identity and shelter, Christine Federighi’s figures embody a more successful union between internal and external significance. Anonymous and mummy-like, they have a haunting presence, their insular stance reminiscent of Giacometti’s standing figures.

Bill Abright alone merges powerful form with potent political content. In his “Generation Lost,” a figure clings to one wall, its crusty, broken limbs decomposing and rejoining the earth unnaturally early. Soft and supple skin--once pliable clay--has become charred and brittle in the aftermath of a devastating event--the bomb, the firing. As in the work of Stephen De Staebler, the human figure becomes an archaic ruin. Abright’s two molten and misshapen “Warheads” stand mutely nearby, accepting all blame.