Show Reveals Christo’s Ideas, but Not Reasons : Art: And the artist’s latest project, which involves Southern California, is all but ignored in Southwestern College exhibit.

Christo has long been a familiar figure on the international art circuit, but later this year, his name, his face and his spectacular ambition will become even better known in Southern California. Come October, the Bulgarian-born artist will be staging a monumental project: the planting of thousands of huge, brightly colored umbrellas on an inland valley north of Los Angeles, and on another north of Tokyo.

Like all of Christo’s large-scale works, “The Umbrellas: A Joint Project for Japan and the U.S.A.” will be erected for only a short time (three weeks) but will be the crest of a wave of enthusiasm, controversy and confusion that began years ago and will produce ripples of the same for years to come.

The current show of Christo’s prints at the Southwestern College Art Gallery gives that wave a new surge of energy. Local interest in the artist’s work--last fed by the 1981-82 Christo exhibition at the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art (then the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art)--is bound to grow among this show’s viewers, for gallery director Larry Urrutia’s broad selection of prints gives ample evidence of the wit and sheer wonder of Christo’s enterprise.

Strangely, though, considering the show’s timing, the “Umbrellas” project is all but ignored here. One poster visualizing the event and a written statement describing it are all that refer to the project, and its presence is sorely missed. Also conspicuously absent from the show is any discussion of the artist’s intent in staging such international, logistic feats as wrapping a cluster of islands in bands of pink fabric or hanging a massive orange curtain across a valley divide. Individual wall labels describe these projects in spare, documentary terms, but they address only the means of their actualization, and never their meaning.

Christo, born Christo Javacheff in 1935, followed a cue from the Surrealists when he began wrapping common objects in cloth, plastic and twine in Paris in the late 1950s. Telephones, magazines and the like assumed new, mysterious identities when concealed, bound and invested with such fetishistic power. Christo soon moved from the discrete object to the architectural element, and began wrapping floors, bridges and entire buildings. He moved permanently to New York in the mid-1960s, and his work began to be associated with pop art and its monumentalizing of the mundane.

Though prints by Christo would seem secondary to his environmental works, this show demonstrates that they are actually fundamental to working out the concepts of the larger projects and also to producing them, for sales of such prints and drawings help finance the larger works. He is remarkably adept at conveying the immediacy of his physical constructions in the prints, for he collages the actual wrapping materials--fabric, usually, and twine--directly onto the printed surface. These areas of bunched, gathered, cascaded and bound fabric speak directly to the art of surprise and the subversion of expectations that are Christo’s forte.

The Southwestern College show offers a comprehensive tour through Christo’s oeuvre --but not a guided one. Basic questions of purpose are never answered or even suggested, and when the artist’s projects reach international scale and the dimensions of an engineering nightmare, one can’t help but wonder why .

Southwestern College Art Gallery, 900 Otay Lakes Road, Chula Vista. Through June 14. Hours are 10-2 Tuesday through Friday, 6-9 Wednesday and Thursday and 12-4 Sunday.

The small etching “Gaia” encapsulates Magda Santonastasio’s artistic style and vision of the universe. It shows a nude, full-figured woman, her arms, legs, belly and breasts pregnant with life. Gridded lines give her skin an undulating rhythm, while fish and other aquatic creatures float across her chest and define her limbs.

Santonastasio, a Costa Rican artist who now lives part time in San Diego, visualizes a fluid universe in this print, a world that, according to the Gaia principle, is a single, living entity. Though not all of her prints and paintings currently on view at the Iturralde Gallery have the same compact energy as “Gaia,” all share the same organic, holistic view of the world.

The works here form a series called “Ko-Koi Noanama,” based loosely on the theme of the poisonous Ko-Koi frog, which lives among native cultures in Central and South American rain forests. The frog itself appears sporadically in Santonastasio’s prints--alone, or, for instance, at the feet of a reclining woman. The woman seems in peaceful repose, but that poisonous frog is dangerously near, as are threatening, long-beaked birds in the shadowy trees above.

As if a literal fulfillment of the Gaia principle, there is no dead space in Santonastasio’s prints. Lines, dashes, circles, snakes and other creatures fill each page with a dense, breathing network of shapes. Figures of women recur as symbols of life and creation, as the “Mistress of Seeds,” but, ironically, their expressions are often empty and lifeless, and the beauty of Santonastasio’s vision suffers. Her paintings, too, are utterly unconvincing, their fields of interlocking colors and lines simply flat and dull.

Iturralde Gallery, 7592 Fay Ave. Through June 2. Hours are 10-6 Tuesday through Friday and 11-6 Saturday.

CRITIC’S CHOICE: RETURN OF INSTALLATION

Installation Gallery has officially been revived, and its first exhibition in its new incarnation and new locale will end this Saturday. Mario Lara’s “Leviathan” invites visitors up a short flight of stairs to a platform nested into a web of scaffolding, beams and potted plants. A survival station of sorts, Lara has spread boxes of dehydrated food, camouflage clothing, a copy of Hobbes’ “Leviathan” and an old Army survival manual across a gray flannel blanket on the platform. New-age music and an indiscernible spoken message (whose script is available in the gallery) float from speakers tucked into joints of Lara’s structure. Though not terribly rich with ideas, Lara’s installation does possess a brief, haunting power, in the form of fleeting feelings of isolation, escape, vulnerability and self-reliance.

Installation Gallery (719 E St.) is open noon to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday.