SAN DIEGO COUNTY : Markarian’s Art Mysterious but Stunning

Last year, Alexia Markarian showed a group of paintings at MiraCosta College that scrambled together images of women, animals, violence and disaster. Markarian’s mild disdain for how the popular media represent women held these disparate images together, but her message felt restrained. She painted with a keen sense of visual tension, but conceptually, the work lacked force and direction.

Markarian’s recent work, now on view at the Dietrich Jenny Gallery (660 9th Ave., through Oct. 21), wanders just as deftly through obscure terrain. It bypasses the familiar but disturbing world of Markarian’s earlier work to burrow into a personal netherworld, a heated realm of mystery and passion. Visually stunning, the paintings burn with energy, their surfaces aflame with flickering lashes of red, orange and yellow. Green highlights lend the scenes a theatrical, haunting glow.

What drives the passion and intensity of these paintings remains a mystery. The imagery suggests allegorical readings or metaphorical messages, but Markarian, a local artist, locks her secrets tightly within.

Trees and wild beasts are regulars in the heated tableaux, and often, they masquerade as one another. Markarian’s beasts resemble wild boars, but their stocky bodies seem fashioned of tree trunks. Their bluntly cut-off noses and tails reveal the concentric rings of trees, and their striated skins recall the texture of wood and the pattern of its grain. Their limbs, short and thick, protrude like truncated branches from their solid bodies.

Just as the animals seem born of wood, so do the trees behave like animate beings. In “Power Stick,” a triangular painting, a cleanly cut log transforms into a whirling dervish, its stubby limbs like so many sinuous arms. In “Take Fire,” also painted on a triangular wood panel, Markarian sets a log across one long edge, parallel to an approaching grass fire. A single branch sprouts from the log and twists toward the impending danger as if alert and watchful.

The process reverses in “Bone Meal,” where two of the beasts stand upright, as immobile and rooted as trees, their limbs firmly planted in their sides. A bone dangles from a string between them, but both can only eye it and snarl in their static state. Their long, sharp claws and the red hot glow from their mouths threaten to break the calm created by a curtain of green leaves behind them.

The beasts retain their tree-like form and texture throughout Markarian’s work, but in other paintings, their energy cannot be contained. In “After the Classics,” three of them, each a different primary color, bound furiously toward a pile of limp, vulnerable fish. Three more of the blunt-nosed, razor-toothed creatures lumber after each other in a circle in “Follow the Leader.” These odd animals barely make it over the short walls in their path as they chase each other in a frenzied game of blind belief.

Markarian’s skill as a painter not only breathes life into these disquieting beasts but makes them pulsate with a feverish intensity. Though distantly related to the charged animal imagery of Melissa Miller and Leonard Koscianski, Markarian’s paintings occupy a more private, dream-like space that owes little to nature as we know it.

In “Garden Wall,” she focuses solely on trees, frosting the canvas with a dazzling, golden light. The tempered violence of her animal scenes gives way here to a gentler, but equally striking vision. A golden door, barred by a massive beam, separates the two spaces of the painting--inside the garden, whose path is strewn with felled branches, and outside, where trees stretch healthily upward into the green sky.

Markarian creates a compelling tension by placing the viewer at the foot of the garden walk, privy to both worlds yet somehow trapped within the walled space. The heat and rich light of her paintings send out a seductive call, only to ensnare the viewer in their odd, discomfiting dramas.