Lack of Substance Puts Big Dent in Sculptures : Art: Kenneth Matsumoto’s works are lovely to look at, but their slick, formulaic quality takes away much of their power.

Kenneth Matsumoto’s sculptures are beautiful--and bland. Like postcards of stunning landscapes, their beauty is contained, balanced, a bit too perfect. While a few evocative, enduring works give pause to the more meditative viewer, most of the work in the David Zapf Gallery show can be seen, swallowed and digested with a single, short glance.

The San Jose sculptor has a keen sense of his materials--glass, steel, concrete and stone--and he squeezes a fair amount of expressiveness from them. In his standing sculptures, he sandwiches panes of frosted glass between slabs of marble, onyx and rusted steel to create compact suggestions of monumental landscapes. The stone slabs, with their smooth, striated surfaces and jagged edges, imply dramatic mountain ranges. When behind frosted glass, the stone reads as shadowy contour through atmospheric mist.

These microcosmic landscapes, shaped as squares, rectangles or crosses, stand on elegant, long-legged steel pedestals. Matsumoto often tips the sculptures at an angle and sets them to rest on a steel cylinder, perhaps to inject a note of tension into these otherwise exceedingly harmonious works.

Other, wall-mounted sculptures take a more literal approach to viewing landscape, for each consists of a large frosted glass square with a window excised from its center. Within the window, Matsumoto has sculpted landscape vignettes, again from fragments of stone and rusted steel. Diamond-plate steel, with its sprightly pattern of raised nubs, reads as a rainy sky in one work, as a more abstract textural accent in others.

Matsumoto’s work may lack tension and gristle, but it does present a rich array of formal and material contrasts, especially between geometric and organic elements and between crisp, pristine surfaces and those that are craggy and rusted. Even these attractive polarities take on a slick, formulaic quality, however, after Matsumoto repeats them without much variation.

Two notable exceptions to these works are “Untitled (Kneel 8),” a Joel Shapiro-like quip of figurative abstraction, and the three-part “Pacific Series.” Though the latter are the quietest objects in the show, the least assuming and perhaps the simplest, they are also the most profound.

Each is a mere nine-inch bronze square, less than two inches thick, but with a surface like a gently rippling fragment of the ocean’s skin. The three works differ primarily in patina, one being a dark blue-black, while another is tinged with gold. Small and sensuous, these tiles from the sea feel as natural and unconstrained as the rest of the show feels tight and contrived.

David Zapf Gallery, 2400 Kettner Blvd., through Sept. 7. Open Friday and Saturday, noon-5 p.m., or by appointment (232-5004).

CRITIC’S CHOICE: THE PRAGUE CONNECTION

Local artist and arts commissioner Mario Torero traveled to Prague for a month last May. He came back a different man, he says. Prague now “is a center of anarchy and very open to anything. . . . It’s all so vivid being amidst the most powerful, dynamic cultural renaissance in the world today.” While there, Torero created two murals and shot video footage of “the people, the new expressions, the social changes and public manifestations of a young and rapidly growing society.”

Here in San Diego, Torero is in the process of creating another mural at Installation Gallery downtown (719 E St.)--this one temporary--as part of an exhibit called “The Totalitarian Zone.” The continually evolving show, which closes Sept. 21, will include articles, photographs and publications from Torero’s trip, as well as the video that he made there. Installation is open Tuesday through Saturday from noon-5 p.m. for visitors to watch Torero complete the mural.

Torero’s video will also be screened at 7 p.m. Thursday on the third floor of the downtown public library. The artist will speak about his experiences, and a representative of Czech president Vaclav Havel will be present.