Trapping Passion on Canvas : Art: Painter Fernando Lopez-Lage makes his American debut with an explosive collection that uses symbols of both spirituality and sexuality.

Fernando Lopez-Lage is a young Uruguayan painter whose brush overflows with passionate irreverence. In his first American show, at the Linda Moore Gallery in Mission Hills (and continuing down the block at Botanica Flowers and Gardens), Lopez-Lage defies the boundaries of polite restraint to indulge in an art of excess.

His large, unstretched canvases throb with color--gold, blood red, black, pink, blue, white, skeletal gray and the tone of sallow flesh. In these tight mosaics of pattern and figuration, Lopez-Lage fuses moments of pain, lust, hope, humor and sheer sensual reverie. Networks of personal and cultural symbols provide a certain structure to this wildly aggressive work. Some of the symbols can be deciphered--the nurse as an emblem of healing, for instance--while others remain opaque in meaning but generous in terms of pure formal power.

Crosses, halos, angels, virgins and burning candles give an air of Christian ritual to the work, but Lopez-Lage counters these symbols of spirituality with others of unabashed sensuality. Men and women both flaunt their sexuality, even to the point, in one painting, of engaging in a blatantly erotic act while under the watchful eye of a female saint. A spiked phallus spews stars in another, while a woman’s legs part to reveal an erupting volcano.

Lopez-Lage equates sex with pleasure and a release from the constraints of religious propriety, but he also unmasks its potential to be a grotesque act of violence. In several works, uniformed men stand with their pants lowered to their thighs, observing or engaging in bizarre physical acts. These paintings bring to mind the work of George Grosz, whose German industrialists and politicians of the 1920s were always shown with bulging crotches, indicating that their abuses of power were not only political, but physical as well.

Lopez-Lage hasn’t the visually refined weaponry of Grosz, nor his obvious targets. But with its surfaces of unabated intensity and scenes of unsavory instincts and unchecked urges, his work can certainly hold its own in terms of energy and potency.

Linda Moore Gallery, 1611 W. Lewis St., open Monday through Saturday 9-5, and Botanica Flowers and Gardens, 1633 W. Lewis St., open Monday through Saturday 8-6. The show continues at both locations through June 30.

A common interest in spiritual themes has brought the work of Michael Golino and Matthew Chase together in a show at the David Lewinson Gallery. But, aside from this general thematic overlap, the two artists have little in common. Golino’s work owes its strength to an extraordinary formal elegance, while Chase practices a style of faux-naif simplicity.

Golino, a local artist, achieves an effect akin to industrial sensuousness in his “Lares” (titled with the ancient Roman name for a household deity), and other free-standing and wall-mounted sculptures. He sheathes them in skins of sheet lead, then uses domestic chemicals such as bleach, vinegar and ammonia to stain the surfaces with pools of green, yellow and magenta. When Golino incises lines in the lead, it is as if he is opening its rich veins, for saturate color clings to the edges of the furrows.

Whether shaped like an unfurled fan or a descending zigzag line, Golino’s works possess a commanding physical presence. Yet they are also delicate and poetic. Golino transfers photographic images onto the works and embosses them with words that touch on a variety of subjects, from the worship of the home and the destruction of the environment to the spiritual, psychological and physical power of words themselves.

The words nous (French for we) and noose appear together in one work, a bilingual pun that suggests the potential confinement of relationships. “An Incantation” spews a continuous stream of answers to the question of what Golino’s own expectations of his work might be: “An incantation an avocation a substantiation a repudiation a hesitation a deliberation a visitation a liberation a disintegration.” And, on one side of a small, house-shaped panel called “Lares, of home,” Golino stamps the words, “The (H)earth is a flower.” On the other, the gentle echo, “The Heart(h) is a flower.”

Though Golino’s work deliberates on both weighty and delicate matters, ultimately its beauty overwhelms all content. In these icons, form is god.

Chase, who lives in Santa Fe, presents three distinct types of work in this show: carved masks depicting figures from Greek mythology; small ossuaries, glass-encased shrines for human and animal bones; and wall-mounted assemblages on biblical themes. In addition to the diffusion of focus inherent in this display, Chase’s work also suffers from a slight confusion of tone. It hovers uneasily between the genuine and the contrived, between real folk spirituality and self-conscious primitivism.

What redeems the work from this schizophrenic bind is Chase’s adept manipulation of his materials. A tangle of old wire, painted blue, becomes a raging stream in “The Guardian Angel,” a tableau of poignancy and raw power. Two small figures cross over the stream on a wooden bridge, while hills of rusted metal rise in the background and an angel with actual bird feather wings looms above, warding off threats.

Works like this one show Chase to have a keen instinct for transforming the basest of materials into evocative form. Often, however, this effort is pushed too hard, and Chase’s earthy, earnest intentions yield only works of forced charm.

David Lewinson Gallery, Del Mar Plaza, 1555 Camino Del Mar, through June 30. Open Monday through Saturday 10:30-9, Sunday 11-6.