Opposites Wed in Painting, Sculpture Exhibit

The show is called “Relationships,” but it has little to do with bonds between humans or the marriage that joins its two artists, Toby and Edgar Buonagurio. Formal opulence and an obsession with technique characterize the work of both New York artists, but differences in appearance, approach and purported meaning outweigh these similarities.

Perhaps opposites do attract. In any case, they are wed in this exhibition at the Faith Nightingale Gallery (535 4th Ave.) through April 7. Wita Gardiner, whose gallery formerly occupied this space, curated the show, bringing together Edgar’s elegant, formulaic paintings and Toby’s garish, eclectic sculpture.

Edgar bridges the exotic past with the computer era in his “abrasion paintings” by sheathing a mode of ornamentation that blossomed in another time and place beneath a slick, contemporary skin. To create the dense, perfectly smooth surfaces of his paintings, the artist applies pools of color to a wood support with catsup dispensers, then grinds down the encrusted surface with an electric sander. The patterns and color schemes, recalling the mosaics and architectural ornamentation of Islamic mosques, Byzantine churches and Italian palazzi , are generated by computer.

Despite the highly controlled and somewhat sterile nature of their creation, the paintings possess a tantalizing visual richness. Their deep mauve, vibrant green and opalescent markings defy geometric structure and melt into one another with fluid, languid ease. Rows of chubby blots of color reinforce the integrity of the designs, but the overall effect is of a mosaic worn down almost beyond recognition or seen with blurred vision.

Whether rectangular or shaped like ornate architectural fragments, the paintings carry the status of relics, excerpts from an opulent past. The artist intends these paintings to convey “ancient, timeless, spiritually substantive, archetypal realities,” a hope that tinges on hyperbole. What the work lacks in conceptual or intellectual depth, however, it makes up for in pure physical beauty.

Toby’s technical finesse also dazzles, to the point of baroque excess. Her ceramic figures and wall pieces shout at an alarming decibel level, considering how little they have to say. A series of robot figurines, each about 2 feet tall, attempts to merge sci-fi glitz with earthy power. Snakes and alligators nuzzle around the figures’ intensely colored, angular garb, but the effect is puerile and unconvincing.

Flora and fauna embellish a series of female heads, again to garish effect. Starfish, lobster, birds, butterflies and flowers heaped atop the heads and swathed around their necks stretch the oft-interpreted kinship of women and nature to its kitsch extreme.

Only in the artist’s series of trophies does her use of excessive adornment carry meaning and not just dead weight. Although most of her work subscribes to a worship of the gaudy and overdone, in the trophies the aesthetic of excess is turned on its head, mocked and made to look repulsive. Using the same wild palette of glazes, glitters and lusters, Toby constructs wall hangings strewn with daggers and limp animal carcasses, all enclosed within jewel-encrusted borders. In exaggerating--and thereby undermining--the purported glamour of the hunter’s sport, she gives her flashy style a much-needed dose of substance.

Chopsticks, taller than an average person, lean against one wall. A hugely oversized spoon hangs from another. Nearby stands an iron, equally immense. Amanda Farber’s sculptures of wood and painted aluminum, at the Dietrich Jenny Gallery (660 9th Ave., through March 11), skew all sense of scale and function. Common, utilitarian objects lose their relation to the hand and house, as Farber transforms them into focuses for the eye and mind.

Farber, a young local artist whose exhibition at Palomar College’s Boehm Gallery was one of the most refreshing of 1988, plays with contradictions, wit and humor in these works. Our normal perception of spoons or irons clashes with Farber’s distorted versions, and an awkward, amusing disparity emerges between the objects as we know them and as they are interpreted by the artist. She chooses basic, generic versions of household objects rather than slick, high-tech products, but she negates even the mass-produced anonymity of the common spoon by constructing her version by hand, leaving seams and brush strokes clearly visible. The works are clumsy, to the point of being endearing.

The wit and punning humor that pervaded the Palomar show is in shorter supply here, however, for Farber is veering away from representational sculpture toward more abstract and esoteric statements. Many of the objects here evoke no recognizable source. One untitled work, painted green, bulges off the wall in ripples of diminishing size. Nearby leans a curved slab painted with red and black striations.

Instead of toying with their links to the familiar and mundane, as do the representational works, these abstract sculptures claim a higher purpose. They distill form to its most essential, nearly geometric components, and are spared of the extraneous trappings of detail. Unfortunately, this paring down yields only more clumsy forms, shaved of any profundity or formal eloquence. The objects are quirky and minimal, but downright stingy in meaning.