Show at Sushi Is Artistic Alternative to a Diet of Faberge Eggs : Art: What exhibit lacks in pomp and ceremony it makes up for with meaningful content.

The Soviet arts festival may be whisking its audience, in spirit, to a different time and place, but a small show at Sushi gallery quickly snaps one back to reality. “Off the Back Burner,” like last year’s “Tourist Plantation” bus poster mounted during Super Bowl week, offers critique in a period of unabashed hype. The pomp and ceremony of the arts festival will fade to a remote echo in a few weeks, but the issues addressed in this show will persist.

In a dozen wall-mounted text panels, local (and L.A.) artists and arts administrators voice their concerns about art and society in general. Their statements range from the straightforward and explanatory to the impassioned and intimate.

Along the way, they touch upon censorship and the politicization of art, the need of the local art community to organize and take control of its fate, the exploitation of labor along the U.S. border with Mexico, the challenge to “connect the dots . . . learn from each other . . . find the inter-cultural . . . inter-genderal . . . inter-disciplinary common ground future,” the moral paralysis of most Americans despite the need and desire for change, and the fear of “mass movements and homogenous thinking.”

Though most of the texts are neither as tough nor as incisive as last year’s array (the show is an annual event), there are a few good nuggets to chew on. The show reminds us that neither art--nor festivals--are made in a vacuum, but that both exist within a complex web of intellectual, social and political concerns.

Also at Sushi, two local painters have been linked in a show titled “Near Crisis.” Both artists dwell on the damage inflicted on the world by so-called advances in civilization.

Martha Matthews’ paintings portray an abused, abandoned landscape, the victim of industry’s advance. The infallible geometries of bridges, concrete pilings and factory buildings frame bodies of murky water and the charred, writhing remains of trees. A tragic, post-apocalyptic air hangs heavy over these desolate vistas, but Matthews also feels drawn to the romantic, and she paints these scenes with a luminous splendor.

Although their grandeur links these paintings to a 19th-Century American landscape tradition, they also recall a brand of gritty realism from the early decades of this century. Matthews braids together the somber and the beautiful, the bleak and the utopian with such richness and poignancy that each seems fatally bound to the other. The uneasy seductiveness that results from this mix is uncannily close to the reaction elicited by progress itself.

Paul Hobson’s paintings appear tight and a bit dry next to Matthews’ lush, smoky visions, and their meticulousness is far less absorbing. Hobson focuses on concrete, contemporary events and manmade tragedies, but he renders them with a Surrealist’s penchant for distorted scale and disjunctive imagery.

“Undetected” juxtaposes an airport security checkpoint with a distant view of a crashed plane, emitting a feathery plume of brown smoke. In “Border Crossing,” two orbs in the dark, tempestuous sky send beams of light down to the ground in the search for illegals. By dotting the landscape with solemn white crosses, Hobson gives his view of the border a mournful, sympathetic quality. None of his other works betray as much meaning or emotion.

The shows continue at Sushi (852 Eighth Ave.) through November 25.

The Tasende Gallery’s exhibition of work by Giacomo Manzu, titled “Sacred and Profane,” is light on both but heavy on the morally neutral and aesthetically bland.

The Italian sculptor’s career stretches from the 1930s to the present, as does this show. “Cristo con Generale” (1942), a bas-relief, exemplifies Manzu’s facility with bronze, his ability to compress emotion into a shallow slab of metal. Two figures emerge only slightly from the mottled, bleak surface--Christ, hanging now by only one arm, limp yet still graceful, and a stout, fat-bellied general, standing close by but observing Christ’s suffering from a distinct emotional distance.

Manzu’s respect for the dying Christ and his contempt for his crass companion issue clearly from this work, though its execution is both subtle and restrained. An ink drawing of the same subject, from the same year, states the case more directly but with less impact.

The show skips from the 1940s to the 1970s without a transition, and the bulk of the show dates from the last few years. The tableau style of the early bas-relief has evolved into a fully dimensional, staged quality in the later work.

A series of chairs, adorned with draped fabric and leafy branches (all in bronze) feel excessively self-conscious, and though the small bronze baskets of fruit and foliage extend the traditional still life into three dimensions, they remain stuck in the realm of the decorative and demure.

“Divertimento,” a bronze of 1983, is the only recent work to match the grace and eloquence of the early bas-relief. A table, set for a single guest, it bears the trappings of a meal just completed. A knife and fork, crude and oversized, rest against the lone plate, empty but for a small, olive-like object. A tasseled napkin sits next to the plate as if casually dropped there. A cup, the simplest of cylinders, melts seamlessly into the table itself, next to a bottle of wine and a woven basket.

The scene, stark and silent, feels frozen, suspended in time without context or clue. Outside of his work on religious themes, which is barely represented here, few of Manzu’s works carry such emotional weight or narrative possibility.

The show continues at the Tasende Gallery (820 Prospect St.) through the end of November.