ART REVIEWS : Brazilian Works Offer Thanks for Healing : Sculpture: Marymount exhibition displays work by native artists who believe divine intervention played a part in curing their ills.

Contemporary art can be so secretly coded that it takes an insider to figure it out. The folk art in “House of Miracles: Votive Sculpture From Northeastern Brazil,” at Loyola Marymount University’s Laband Art Gallery, may seem equally foreign, but the sculpture’s meaning could hardly be more clear to those who are initiated in Catholic tradition.

Wooden feet, hands, heads, eyes, ears and breasts displayed in the gallery represent parts of devotees’ bodies believed to have been healed by prayer. Sculptural animals, houses and machinery also stand for answered prayers. Acting in accordance with a centuries-old tradition still practiced today, those who believe that divine intervention has helped them out of adversity give thanks by placing symbolic votive sculptures in “houses of miracles” at major pilgrimage centers or at small wayside shrines.

The Loyola exhibition would be as simple as that if it weren’t for complexities and variations of a tradition that is rooted in Greco-Roman pagan rituals and spans much of the globe. The show zeroes in on 20th-Century sculpture from northeastern Brazil, but this sampling of naive sculpture still masks secrets about a faith that inspires people to make long pilgrimages to offer concrete thanks.

Such ailments as a lump on a man’s stomach, a bloody wound on a skull, a swollen foot and a woman with one breast are detailed in the sculpture, but representations of unblemished appendages, heads or entire bodies offer no clue to afflictions--or to any medical treatment that might have been applied.

Catalogue essays and posted excerpts provide useful insight into the ex-voto tradition, however. We learn, for example, that most Brazilian carvers don’t make their living from votive sculptures; it’s an extra job and some of them accept no payment for it. Devotees commission sculpture from their village carvers or purchase carvings at fairs and religious gatherings. Few of the artists sign their work, which may be no more than rudimentary renderings or expressionistic carvings of notable style and wit.

Among the exhibition standouts, from an aesthetic point of view, are a 9-inch-tall statue of a girl with a broken neck whose head rolls over and rests on her left shoulder, and a 23-inch-tall male figure with a flat, oval face and arched shoulders and hips. Two little houses appear to be tiny fortresses, while a turkey is carved with such attention to form and detail that the artist must have thought his subject was a rare and beautiful bird.

Tourists who poke around in rural areas of New Mexico are sometimes startled to come across tiny rooms in dark churches that are filled with crutches, prosthetic devices, votive sculptures, photographs of devotees and written testimonials to mystical healing powers. These offerings cover walls, hang from ceilings and pile up in corners until the rooms that hold them resemble crypts of pain and hope.

The Laband Art Gallery offers a sanitized version of this experience in an altar-like installation, which forms the centerpiece of the intriguing exhibition. The remainder of the gallery, painted in circular strokes of sunny yellow, contains glass cases of votive sculpture along with photo murals and explanatory text. The blend is quite effective, offering visitors a semblance of a “house of miracles,” plus an opportunity to see individual objects presented as folk art.

The traveling exhibition was organized by the Americas Society in New York.

Laband Art Gallery, Loyola Marymount University, Loyola Boulevard at West 80th Street, (213) 338-2880. Wed.-Fri., 10:30 a.m.-4:30 p.m.; Sat.-Sun., noon-4:30 p.m.; to Aug. 26.

Modern Archeology: A show of monoprints and one large painting by Terence La Noue is a study in textures, layers, lost-and-found motifs and rich passages of color. These components add up to a body of work that often appears to have been unearthed rather than built up, as it is, in a complex series of processes.

In his monoprints, cast from textured and carved wood templates, La Noue starts with a small detailed image--say, an etching of a gemstone’s structure. He develops an ambitious monoprint that enlarges and expands upon the small picture, then affixes it to the finished print. The idea stands out rather like a label of a thought process. This conceptual approach is interesting to think about but not necessarily successful in visual terms. Bearing patchwork codes to recurring motifs, the monoprints often appear disjointed.

We have only to look at the masterful painting in a rear gallery to see that La Noue’s forte involves digging through various cultures and artifacts, coming up with such finds as a German staircase or an African textile, and combining these motifs in paintings that are enriched by diversity but feel like unified wholes.

Dorothy Goldeen Gallery, 1547 9th St., Santa Monica, to July 28.