Rafael Serrano at Play in the Fields of Painting, Photography

‘I like to be an eclectic sort of artist; I want to go back and forth and not ever become stagnant in one approach,” says Rafael Serrano, who opens a show of his paintings at Venice’s Marquardt Gallery on Thursday.

The show is the third to focus on Serrano’s paintings, following last year’s solo show at Jan Baum Gallery and a group show at Marquardt. But he is best known in art circles for his photographs, which became so popular a few years ago that he was included in the L.A. County Museum’s “Avant-Garde in the ‘80s” as well as shows at New York’s Alternative Museum and San Diego’s Museum of Photographic Arts.

But for Serrano, a trained painter who received his master’s degree from Otis/Parsons Art Institute, resting on his photography laurels wasn’t enough.

“I felt exhausted by photography, and I had this desire to get my paintings exhibited as well,” he says. “A lot of people told me I was being foolish and that I should stick to a good thing . . . and for two-and-a-half or three years I didn’t exhibit anything. The dealers were still clamoring for my photographs, but they didn’t seem to want my paintings. But I just decided, I’m not going to do it for them, I’m going to do it for myself. I never thought I had it in me to be that honest. But I stuck it out, and now it’s very gratifying to me that the paintings are getting shown.”

Although the Cuban-born Serrano, 36, has set the camera aside for more than three years, he says he will return to photography, and hopes to go back and forth between the two mediums comfortably. At least one top L.A. dealer has talked to Serrano about showing his paintings dand photographs together, and he says that is a main goal for the immediate future.

But while Serrano constantly refers to his work as “eclectic”--some of his paintings are figurative and others deal with abstractions and symbols--the themes throughout are cohesive. The more abstract paintings deal with gender dichotomies while the figurative paintings evolved directly from his widely exhibited photographic series “Fertility of War,” and deal with themes of sex and aggression.

“I feel that a great deal of violence is an extension of our sexual drive,” says Serrano, who is no relation to Andres Serrano, the artist who touched off a censorship controversy with his “Piss Christ” photo in 1989.

Although Serrano faced his own censorship controversy in late 1989 when his phallic photograph “Panorama--Night” was pulled from an announcement for a show at Cypress College, he has not yet encountered any fire for his similarly themed paintings, such as “Orestes,” which is based on a Greek archetypal myth about the tragic consequences of an insatiable sexual drive. That work features a thin, tragically stretched man being bound and strangled by his own elongated penis.

“I think my paintings are pretty intelligent; they’re not pornography,” Serrano says. “They’re just getting out there, and so far nothing has happened. But I’m sure if I exhibited them in Cincinnati (where a museum director was tried last year for showing sexually explicit photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe)--well, let’s just say that I’m sure Jesse Helms would not approve.”

THE SCENE

“I want to explore that whole line between graffiti and the need these people who are out tagging things have to express themselves,” says Ann Wycoff, director of the Los Angeles Mural/Documentary Project.

Wycoff’s video was spawned by Merrie Okie’s mural at the William Mead housing project downtown, a 250-foot painting that includes designs by teen-age members of the street gang known as “Dogtown.”

Wycoff says she will focus on the young children around the downtown project plus graffiti artists from throughout the Los Angeles area. The $15,000 for the mural and documentary was raised through a benefit party and the sale of Okie’s artwork.

“There’s all this ugliness down there, so (Okie) decided to get these kids out there to paint, rather than just tagging things illegally after dark,” said Wycoff. “There’s this whole inner-city Angst that can be explored . . . by letting them work on actual art. “

The mural, at the corner of Leroy Street and North Main, was expected to be completed today. Wycoff’s documentary, which she hopes to sell to public TV stations, is scheduled for completion in April. Okie says she will continue the project with future murals at other inner-city locations.

OVERHEARD

“Philharmonic Style,” a collaborative evening in which Music Center attendees also visited the Museum of Contemporary Art, brought new viewers to the downtown museum. But not all of them liked everything they saw. “Would you ever know that this is art?” said one nicely dressed woman to another, pointing to Joel Shapiro’s untitled plaster-on-wood floor sculpture in “Recent Work/Recent Acquisitions.” “No, I sure wouldn’t,” replied her companion.

CURRENTS

Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions has made two interim appointments to manage the downtown arts space while a search for a new executive director is conducted. Neil Barclay, a corporate attorney and arts administrator, has been named managing consultant and Adriene Jenik, LACE’s video coordinator, has been named programs manager. Former executive director, Roberto Bedoya, left LACE in December.

Meanwhile, applications are due by April 15 for LACE’s Artists’ Projects Grants. Up to eight grants totaling $30,250 will be awarded to artists whose work “explores or extends artistic disciplines and/or cultural traditions.”

A free workshop explaining the grants program and application procedure will be held at LACE on Tuesday at 7 p.m. Information: (213) 624-5650.

HAPPENING

An artist-led van tour of about 10 Westside galleries--including L.A. Louver, James Corcoran and Fred Hoffman--will be conducted on Saturday by the nonprofit art group SITE. The tour costs $40 per person and will go from 10:30 a.m. until about 4 p.m. Paid reservations are required. Information: (213) 837-2719.

The West Coast premiere of “Superstar: The Life and Times of Andy Warhol” will be held Thursday at Laemmle’s Music Hall in Beverly Hills as a benefit for the Hollywood Policy Center’s Freedom of Expression Project. The movie looks at Warhol’s art, films and personal life, and includes interviews with artists, collectors and celebrities including Dennis Hopper, Roy Lichtenstein and David Hockney. “Superstar” opens in theaters on Friday, the fourth anniversary of Warhol’s death. Information: (213) 287-1990.