San Diego Artist Is Intense, Intriguing : Exhibit: David Baze investigates the relationship between men and women in paintings and drawings that capture immediacy and impart tension.

David Baze is simply a great painter. Pigment dances on his canvases with a fluid rhythm, the rhythm of life at its most intense and intriguing. Undeniably rich, luminous and absorbing, Baze’s surfaces yield substance, too, though it is not always as seductive as the package it is wrapped in.

Baze’s new paintings and pastel drawings, at the David Zapf Gallery, extend the sexual tension that has always permeated his work into a new, more intellectualized realm filled with questions of sex definition and sexuality. Women in Baze’s work are defined by their bodies, usually supple, supine figures in sensuous poses. Men, however, are equally limited, for they are always seen in suits or comparable work clothes, determined to achieve.

Baze is restating the obvious sexist stereotypes here, but he also seems to be probing the origins of those roles and questioning their validity.

His drawing “Iron John” takes its title from a current bestseller by the poet Robert Bly, which discusses men’s need to seek the purely masculine within themselves. In Baze’s small image, a suited everyman faces off with his green-faced, slightly ghoulish counterpart. They encounter one another as if strangers, yet Baze’s title would suggest that they are actually twin aspects of a single man.

Women are performers, men producers in Baze’s current take on the world. The “Sensible Man” wears a suit and serious demeanor while stoking a fire. Women typically dance or pose, luxuriating in their physicality. One slithers mermaid-like out of an aquarium toward a meek fellow sitting nearby. Such surreal touches give Baze’s work a fresh, elastic quality, stretching it from relatively traditional, realist portraiture to scenes of odd disjunction.

“Low Tide” is one such painting. Here, men in business suits stand in a shoulder-deep, sparkling aqua sea, while women in bathing suits wade around them. Water and women have long been symbolically paired in art, the one reinforcing the intangible sensuality of the other. Baze updates this tradition by not only showing women at ease in the water, but by showing men at their most awkward in its fluid embrace.

Light, like water, has a liquid sensuality in Baze’s work. His figures bask in a warm, luminous glow. Baze’s loose, languorous brush strokes bring to mind not only other accomplished contemporary painters such as Eric Fischl, but also the brilliant, 19th-Century artist, Edouard Manet.

Like Manet, Baze captures an immediacy and real physical presence through paint. He also imparts tension, by coming in close and catching his figures in a dynamic, filmic splice, with legs and the tops of heads cropped at the edges of the frame. Ultimately, Baze, a San Diego artist, is seduced by the beauty of paint, light, water and women as much as he, in turn, seduces.

David Zapf Gallery, 2400 Kettner Blvd., through June 15. Open Friday-Saturday, noon-5 p.m. and by appointment (232-5004).

Flavia Gilmore practices the art of transformation. By fusing fragments of plastic, wood, paper, metal and other materials into tight sculptural units, she encourages their identities to shift, blur, expand and dissolve.

She ennobles the lowly, giving castoff tools and broken parts a new, formal glory. At the same time, hers is also a democratic art, for the still-usable and the clearly obsolete receive equal status as shape, form and suggestive surface.

Gilmore, who was born in Italy and now lives in San Diego, is the focus of a large exhibition spread between two venues, the Oneiros Gallery and Java Coffeehouse/Gallery. Oneiros features the artist’s newest, wall-mounted assemblages, while Java surveys the past 10 years of Gilmore’s sculpture and drawings.

The formal unity that Gilmore inspires from her disparate materials is unusual among assemblage artists. One of Gilmore’s more provocative techniques for achieving this coherence is the use of a coat of airbrushed tempera paint over most or all of a work. The result is a grainy, luminous skin--in one case a dusty rust color with electric blue shadows--that gives her pieced-together works the appearance of aging, organic objects.

The tone in Gilmore’s work shifts buoyantly from the sprightly “Allegro,” a succinct vision of a musical tempo, to the darker, more brooding “Rex,” a tall, king-like figure of metal and wood (both at Oneiros). Gilmore plays especially adeptly at the game of anthropomorphism, or giving human attributes to objects or beings other than human. In the Java show, she convinces the slits in a bulbous plastic form to become facial features, and two heavy iron hinges to become entire personages.

Gilmore’s materials span from rubber gloves to rope, chain link to cork, screws to steel wool, and her range of expression is equally impressive.

Oneiros Gallery, 711 Eighth Ave., open Friday-Saturday 11 a.m.-5 p.m. and by appointment (696-0882). Java Coffeehouse/Gallery, 837 G Street, open weekdays 8 a.m.-2 a.m., Saturday-Sunday 10 a.m.-2 a.m. Both shows continue through June 15.

CRITIC’S CHOICE: SPEAK UP ON PORT ART

“Speak now or forever hold your peace” might be an apt title for meetings being held by the San Diego Unified Port District to help determine the shape of its public art master plan. Four meetings are scheduled; the first is tonight from 6:30-8:30 at the Radisson Hotel, 700 National City Blvd.

Carol and Tom Hobson, art consultants to the port district, will show slides of public art projects around the nation and then ask the audience for ideas on what kind of art San Diego should have for its tidelands. Public input at this stage of the process will have a definite impact on the direction of the port’s public art program.