Violent Vision of Humanity as the Victim

Politics are both monstrously medieval and hauntingly high-tech in Diego Marcial Rios’ powerful show, “Arte Politico: Politics and Art/Art and Politics.”

Rios’ large woodcuts, at Sushi Gallery (852 8th Ave., through Jan. 4), portray a society governed by violence and intimidation. Might makes right in this world--intellect and sensitivity have long since been crushed, relegated to the weak and powerless.

Rios, who lives in Northern California, charges his images with a sense of outrage, but never identifies either the perpetrators or victims of this overwhelming violence.

In “The Order,” he presents a full-length portrait of a timeless warrior, the specter of death itself. A skeleton with blood on its hands, the figure is nothing but bones, sheaths, laces and bolts. A puny, pathetic skull sits atop this hulking yet insubstantial body, and mounted on the head is a gun. The order of the day, suggests Rios, is to shoot first and ask questions later. Destruction precedes thought, and may even have replaced it entirely.

Rios’ vision is a frightening one, extreme and allegorical yet rooted in a fundamental truth about American society’s hair-trigger mentality, and its image as a big, boasting bully. Snakes, flames and jet bombers spew out of a human-like face in the image “It’s the Peace Keeper,” an allusion to the euphemistically named missile. And in other images, the Pope puts in an appearance as shadowy collaborator with the military.

In “The Arena,” Rios shows an immense eagle gnawing at the neck of a flower-wielding serpent. The symbolism seems simple, but the struggle is not merely between good and evil, for Rios makes the players more ambiguous than that. Both creatures seem threatening--the bird with its hulking, oversized presence, the serpent with its razor fangs--and neither promises peaceful conciliation.

Energy and eloquence merge dynamically in Rios’ prints. Figures loom, dive and impose in a realm made bleak by soot and smoke. Death and evil pervade the work, and the biggest victim in this stark scenario is humanity itself.

Local artists Ming Mur-Ray and Mary Louise Donovan have teamed up to produce their own show through Dec. 21 at a newly vacated La Jolla gallery.

Situated in the Merrill Lynch building at Fay Avenue and Silverado Street, Gallery 130 was previously the Rebecca Cabo Gallery and before that Gwydion and Paris Green galleries.

“Self,” Mur-Ray’s series of small oil paintings on steel, possesses a rich, disarming presence, despite the evasiveness of its imagery and the quietness of its presentation.

Mur-Ray’s series of small, rectangular paintings, with tapered bottom corners, divulges little but manages to convey a range of emotions. In each painting, highlights of a face--cheeks, nose, chin--or hand emerge as rust-colored patches in a dark, unyielding ground. The face appears pensive in one image, pained in another, searching, introspective, anxious and wild in the rest. A blindfold appears to mask the eyes in one, while a hand covers them in another.

The immediacy of these images is literal, for the artist makes them by pressing her face directly onto the painted steel plates. She then works with the impression, painting out areas for greater drama or imprinting the wet paint with cloth to animate the texture. Framed in raw steel, the paintings appear strangely old, as though ghostly residues of ancient presences, vague imprints on burial shrouds, enigmatic and slightly haunting.

The concentrated intensity of Mur-Ray’s work could hardly differ more from the diffused blandness of Donovan’s.

Donovan’s assemblages, collectively titled “Changed/Order,” mix organic and artificial materials, often on clear plexiglass shelves joined by steel bolts. When parallels are drawn between the natural and artificial, the work can verge on poetry. Several small, wrapped bundles--of twigs, bamboo and plexiglass rods--have a raw, fetishistic power. A spiraling dried vine couples with copper wire in another poignant moment, but more often the bricks, bark, wood, metals, plastic foam and dried flowers in Donovan’s work merely coexist in close proximity, without stimulating much dialogue.