Cautious Enthusiasm for New Gallery; First Show Is Uneven

The opening of the David Lewinson Gallery this month is cause for cautious celebration. San Diego has seen too many interesting contemporary art galleries pass away prematurely to invest its hopes unreservedly in this new venture. But the opportunity to see work by local artists of a generally high caliber is not offered every day, and it deserves to be seized with enthusiasm.

The gallery, in the new Del Mar Plaza (1555 Camino del Mar), debuts with the show “San Diego Artists Today,” a survey of 25 painters, sculptors and photographers. Lewinson, a local curator and writer, plans to follow this show with solo exhibitions--first Gary Ghirardi, then Peter Stearns--while reserving a part of the gallery for smaller group shows.

Despite the definitive claim of its title, “San Diego Artists Today” is full of both obvious and questionable choices. The good news is that more strong and engaging artists live in San Diego than can be contained in such a show. The bad news is that Lewinson did not skim the cream of the crop but instead chose a cross-section of talents, from the nationally recognized to the provincial and amateurish.

The show peaks with the works of Ghirardi, Michael Golino and Ernest Silva, each of whom fuses painting and sculpture to form his own hybrid medium.

In Ghirardi’s “Two Spaces,” a pair of thick, cement and plaster panels hang together on the wall, touching, nearly one. The physical structure of the works echoes the imagery Ghirardi has incised into the pale mauve panels. With clean, abbreviated lines, he has suggested the presence of two figures, one male and one female, who stand apart but are joined in spirit by a burst of exuberant dashes between them. Ghirardi’s heavy, tough, industrial materials become lyrical, light and tender here; the unlikely becomes natural, inevitable.

Golino has used sheet lead to cover two elongated, cone-shaped panels in his work, “Lust/Conscience.” Puddles of soft pinks, greens and blues soften the metal surface, and incised, colored lines and patterns animate it further. The word “Lust” is stamped repeatedly into one of the panels and “Conscience” is written in a circle on the other. Faint, photographically derived images of women in erotic poses hover over the words, charging them with tension and calling into question whether the human qualities they represent contradict or complement each other.

Silva is represented by three works, a painting and two painted sculptures. “Boat, Volcano and Smoke” feels like a paean to stability in the face of disruption and destruction. A wood-framed canoe, painted red-orange, appears tossed aloft among loops of blue wood, spewing from the mouth of a volcano, also formed of wooden rods and painted in blue, orange, black and gold. The canoe, though tipped, retains its essential integrity despite the natural forces that threaten to overtake it.

Beyond these three artists’ works, the show dips and only partly recovers. It continues through Dec. 30.

A cracked but elegant mannequin’s hand extends from a framed metal panel in Mark Lammie’s “Natural Aura.” Its welcoming gesture pulls one forward while the large branch above it, protruding even farther from the wall, prescribes a greater distance.

With its relatively narrow range of textures (wood and metal) and colors (silver, brown and black), “Natural Aura” stands out as the quietest, most understated work in Lammie’s current show at the Oneiros Gallery (711 8th Ave., through Jan. 12). Its eloquence, however, surpasses that of its companion works, which often present the same contrast between the human or human-made and the organic, but in a more overwrought and clumsy manner.

Lammie’s show, titled “A Sense of Seeing,” addresses man’s abuse of the earth, but the artist’s message of despair too often gets buried by his formal exuberance.

The most modest, organic elements of the works speak most profoundly--the bundle of sticks emerging from a Van Gogh-like canvas, the trio of stones, wrapped simply in wire and suspended in an opening of a larger work.

These are precious, gift-like offerings, reminders of the beauty and profundity of the natural world. Paired, however, with Lammie’s slightly awkward painting style and the other, excessive elements of his constructions, they hardly have a chance to speak.