ART REVIEW : Markarian Work: Near but Far Away

Alexia Markarian’s last two local shows confirmed the artist’s gifts as a painter while denying her a vision easily categorized. In one body of work, she dissected the mass media’s perpetuation of traditional gender roles with dispassionate realism. In the other series of paintings, she gave birth to a fantastic and rich realm somewhere between the organic and the surreal, where base instincts ruled and a seductive gleam filled the air.

Now, in a show at the Oneiros Gallery, Markarian presents an odd series of images that is both harder to interpret and harder to like than the earlier work. Most of the current “Torso Park” show consists of small antiquarian engravings that Markarian has selectively overlaid with a range of disjunctive images. To a picturesque view of a lake, for instance, Markarian has added a seated nude woman in outline and a large sea monster. She has also turned a quiet hillside village into the scene of a disaster by engulfing one of its homes in flames.

Many of these are obvious but seamless intrusions, in which Markarian has kept the sense of scale and space consistent between the original and the overlaid imagery. In many others, however, she breaks that pictorial unity by floating disparate elements over the tranquil scenes--three pigs in profile over a rugged mountain range, a huge rose abloom amid snowy peaks, a skeleton wading through still water, a human brain hovering in the sky like an untethered balloon.

The nearly scientific and precise style of the underlying engravings clashes with Markarian’s more whimsical imaginings, but the tension ignites few sparks. The larger paintings on view here feel equally static. Markarian’s visual vocabulary of anatomical parts and vaguely threatening disjunctions evokes curiosity but no real intrigue. There is a randomness and a remoteness to her approach that prevents her clues from coming together as an engaging riddle.

* Oneiros Gallery, 711 8th Ave., through Dec. 21. Gallery hours are Thursday through Saturday 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. and by appointment ((619)696-0882).