Self-Consciousness Foils Surrealism at Calhoun : Artists: Gallery features three local painters in art show titled “The Shape of My Reality.”

Surrealists come in all shapes, sizes and sensibilities. Some mine the same richly layered psychological terrain as the first generation of surrealists did in the 1920s. Others count as heirs only to the surface effects, but claim the lineage anyway, in hope, perhaps, of living off the inheritance. Locally, the Oneiros Gallery downtown, in particular, has been loyal to a slate of artists who practice a spirited, spiritual variety of surrealism, lyrical and unhurried, dream-like yet astute.

This month, the Calhoun Gallery (2400 Kettner Blvd.) has adopted surrealism as its theme in a show of three local painters. “The Shape of My Reality” features works by Ethel Greene, John DeMarco and Cliff McReynolds.

None of the three seems to rely much on the intuitive, automatic impulses that fueled the original surrealists. Instead, these artists adopt a more conscious, controlled approach that aims to surprise the viewer, to subvert his expectations with incongruous, impossible images. The results here tend to be clever at best, though occasionally they are magical and quietly forceful. More often, the freshness expected of new combinations is squandered on the use of tired cliches.

DeMarco, whose paintings dominate the show, exploits the surrealist legacy shamelessly and soullessly. A woman’s blue blanket transforms into a choppy sea in one painting, tree trunks evolve into voluptuous women in another and a fish on wheels zips through a third, but these transmutations occur in a fixed and finicky fashion. The poetry is forced, the painting style undistinguished.

Visual cliches drag the work down into the deadened realm of illustration: a red rose next to a pair of red lips spells romance, and so on. The female nude appears again and again in DeMarco’s work, but always as a caricature of a mute sexual object--curvaceous, alluring, available.

Next to DeMarco’s baroque fantasies, Greene’s paintings, which can be nearly as trite, look restrained and dignified. In the small, well-chosen selection of her work at Calhoun, Greene presents a vision of the organic world in masquerade. The earth’s elements trade places with each other and with various other textures and substances, so that air takes on the density of fabric in one painting and sand shares a fluid affinity with water in another.

Greene, an enduring presence on the San Diego scene, is also known for her scenes of abandoned eggs and mystical birds, two of which are on view here. Temperate and timeless, Greene’s paintings fiddle with nature’s own definitions while quietly asserting that those boundaries stretch quite naturally and are all part of the same continuum.

McReynolds also champions the notion of a universal unity in his small, highly detailed works of “revelation art.” Macrocosm and microcosm meet in “Forest Floor,” a meticulously rendered view of dense foliage, fungus and flowers beneath a bright, swirling galaxy. In “Expanding Landscape,” too, the surface of the earth throbs with life, while above, celestial bodies swarm together, ally and disperse.

The artist conceives of these paintings as prayers, and reverent, highly sentimental odes they are. The flip side of this worship is a dry, satirical stab at contemporary culture and its anti-spiritual entrapments. A cash register surrounded by hand grenades receives iconic treatment in one image, and in another, the American dream is represented by a security sign warning of an armed response in an otherwise idyllic domestic setting.

The follies of greed and self-satisfaction seem to irk McReynolds the most. In “Two Ego Kings Answer the Eternal Question,” a pair of absurdly dressed figures posture and ponder the hatching of a nearby egg. Not even the flames creeping up one man’s back interfere with the important discussion.

Materialism is the false god and main foe in McReynolds’ “Landscape with Chase Manhattan Cathedral,” an engaging satirical work of small scale and extraordinary detail. Men, women and children--some nude, some dressed as academics and professionals--march in a long religious procession headed by a winged angel, who leads the crowd straight into an abyss. Love and affection abound among the participants, but so does the love of money. One figure holds a banner flying a dollar bill. A massive monument in the shape of a cash register sits on a distant hill and further back stands the skyscraper cathedral whose portal is chiseled with the name of Chase Manhattan Bank.

This small but ambitious painting puts McReynolds more in the shadow of the Renaissance fantasist Hieronymus Bosch than the surrealists and their irreverent instincts, but disjunction is to be found everywhere in this show, welcome or not. The work remains on view through September 29.