SIGHTS AROUND TOWN : Reinventing Nature : Landscape photographs by William Giles and Gene Cooper approach the abstract painter’s realm.

Nature is the general subject at hand at the Nicholas Gallery in Santa Paula. But what photographers William Giles and Gene Cooper find out “in the field” are hidden stories, engaging textures and compositions closer to the turf of an abstract painter than a landscapist.

These are not landscapes for landscapes’ sake. Nature is revisited and reinvented in a modernist’s image of the world. Rocks are not necessarily rocks, and water can be a metaphor for fluidity. Everything you know may be wrong, or at least be only partially true.

The exhibition--well worth a look--situates itself straight down the middle of the artistic tradition of photographers--including Edward Weston and Minor White (with whom Giles worked)--who, with their eyes wide open, have created personal imagery from natural scenes, revealed and transformed by selective vision.

With most of his images in this copious selection, Giles demonstrates a sharp, sentient eye on the beauty lying just beneath the visible nature of things.

The strange property of water, via the distortions of photographic technique, is of keen interest to him. In “Shouting Brook,” white water sweeps down through shiny wet rocks like a milky vapor. His large “Wave” is just that--a freeze-frame portrait of a wave with a palpable sense of force. Stronger yet is “Fury Wave,” in which the intense impact of a wave on the rocks shoots out needlelike rays of water. The watery explosion evokes, paradoxically, both natural violence and also the fluffy texture of white mink.

Giles’ outdoorsy aesthetic sense exists almost completely outside of any urban reality, even when shooting in man’s domain. A yacht in a harbor (from 1957) is a vehicle for what is laid out compositionally like a geometric abstraction. The plush texture of a simple towel against a black background is a study in trivial wonder. In “Steel Stocking,” a mysterious tangle of fencing takes on the appearance of strange hosiery.

Giles sometimes reinterprets his subjects with nudge-nudge humor. “Nude Beach” depicts long rock formations that have been shaped and smoothed by waves into forms like lounging nude human bodies.

Elemental sources of mystery also appear, whether in an enigmatically lit image of a kiva, or a nearly dark twilight scene in “Sioux Territory” (twilight as a metaphor for the American Indian reality?). An archeological ruin seen against a cloudy sky is rendered all the more imposing by the camera’s upward perspective.

Giles’ work seizes the eye more regularly than Cooper’s, by virtue of originality and maturity of vision. Cooper’s images nod, sometimes all too respectfully and derivatively, in the direction of Weston. Familiar strategies pop up. Sand dunes provide sinuous, curving dances of lines, and a broken windowpane supplies a built-in, silhouetted black-on-white image.

Cooper turns tightly cropped scenes of craggy Sierra rock faces into images reminiscent of early Cubism, with its knotty network of facets. Not surprisingly, he finds inspiration at Mono Lake for surreal, primitivist shots. In one image of the eerie lake, an island rock formation under a stormy sky evokes visions of a barnacle-covered Atlantis.

Cooper can also be a bit wily, interspersing fool-the-eye touches amid all the nature lore. An old, rusty gas pump insignia is seen with the ancient dignity and pomp of an American Indian pendant. Another seemingly rock-based image turns out to be the fruits of man’s handiwork--a close-up of rust and Bondo.

These photographers play off the relativity and mutability of vision--vision in both the literal and figurative sense. It’s an area of interest to which photography, when handled with care, lays a special claim.

Also in the gallery are a few stone-and-wood sculptures, a logical three-dimensional extension of the geological imagery on the walls. Tom Vett, as well as Paul Lindhard and Neil Pinholster from Ventura’s Art City, present their alternately polished and elemental stone works.

ART CITY DEPARTMENT:

Speaking of Art City, the current exhibition in the handsomely rustic Art City II Gallery comes equipped with the canny title “From the Interior.” One could say that true artistic impulses always bubble up from the psychological interior, but the works here seem to extend beyond that interior into realms of history, mythology and politics.

The show’s centerpiece is a striking triptych called “The Birth of Meso-America” by the gifted Nicaraguan-born artist Omar de Leon, who lives in Camarillo. In this compositionally rich tableaux-like scene, voluptuous yet surreal figures interlock. The image is tinged with mythology and the thick cross-references of Latin American mural art.

In a more purely sensuous vein, de Leon’s “Los Dormientos” features nude sleepers, lost in a kind of dreamy and languid repose, modeled in a style redolent of Blue Period Picasso. De Leon is someone to watch and admire.

Eric Richards, who has a penchant for polemics and satire, has often shown his sculptures around town, but is represented here by a painting that makes for a contrapuntal companion piece to de Leon’s more poetic triptych.

Richard’s “Third World Door” deftly juxtaposes artifacts that queasily connect the United States to the Third World--coffee, bananas, a bikini-clad blonde (emblem of leisure). Nearly obscured behind a grate is a downtrodden group of peasants, the invisible human cargo.

Also of note in the gallery are the paintings and sculptures of unstoppable Ventura artist Charles Fulmer. His paintings are rough and loose, buzzing with energy and writhing with strange nudes, while his sculptures--despite their odd, androgynous features--look like elegant, primitive totems. By contrast, Richard Schaefer’s landscapes are subtle and swarthy, verging on abstraction, and built of thick tactile layers of paint.

All in all, “From the Interior” serves up a solid sampling of the diversity of impulses from the interior of Ventura County.

* WHERE AND WHEN

“Seeing Inward: The Photographs of William Giles and Gene Cooper” at the John Nichols Gallery, 910 E. Main St., Santa Paula, through November.

“From the Interior,” a group show featuring the work of Nicaraguan artist Omar de Leon, at Art City II Gallery, 31 Peking St., Ventura, through October.