Spark Is Missing at Centro Exhibit : The Art: All the ingredients are right in this two-man show. But the artists fail to give their works real passion.

You can build a perfect pile of firewood, but you can’t make it burn.

That, ultimately, is the message sent by the current two-man show at the Centro Cultural de la Raza. John Bermudes’ installation and Luis Stand’s paintings and installations come across as just so much unspent fuel. The ingredients are right, the potential is there, but neither artist gets the flames roaring. Instead, both bodies of work are remarkably static and passionless, especially given the heated themes they purport to address.

Luis Stand, a student in UC San Diego’s master of fine arts program, uses the image of piled firewood in several of his paintings. Lungs, hearts, thorny branches, vessels, pieces of fruit, the logs and free-form shapes all float weightlessly on the surface of his canvases. They obey an aesthetic sense of ordered disorder that makes them visually interesting, and their colors of dust and blood are rich, but together, the symbols have no collective meaning. The chemistries of tension, contrast, irony or humor have all been bypassed in favor of the principle of inertia.

Stand has titled his portion of the show “Historical Ceremonies.” Images relating to Christian religion, physical passion and colonial oppression filter through from time to time, but, taken as a whole, the work assumes no clear direction and its disparate parts are too weak to stand on their own.

The title installation, “Historical Ceremonies,” occupies an entire long wall with its map-like drawings of Central and South America and Africa and its wall-mounted coffee and tomato cans planted with live flowers. But the combination of images is surprisingly mute. Stand delivers the same stillborn concepts in the installation “Homenaje a Espana” (Homage to Spain). Though the title of the work and its trio of crosses might suggest a comment on Spain’s history as a colonizing power that imposed its religion on those it oppressed--a theme also hinted at in the curatorial statement by the Centro’s Patricio Chavez--Stand never propels or even prompts us toward one interpretation or another. His work simply presents itself in all of its bland harmony.

Bermudes’ installation suffers the same self-inflicted fate. The Los Angeles artist, a recent MFA graduate of the California Institute of the Arts, skims the surface of several juicy topics but keeps his work dry, dry, dry.

The dichotomy--or at least the perceived dichotomy--between the life of the spirit and the life of the flesh seems to be the central theme of the installation, “Confessions of the Flesh.” The church’s expectations of its followers and the commercialization of religion play bit parts here, too, but none of these notions is fleshed out enough to give the work real content.

The seven separate elements of the installation serve as cryptic notes toward an unresolved message. Among the work’s parts are two small plastic figurines of Christ, one opening his arms to embrace the other, and an oversized, kitsch cornucopia, decorated with tinsel and flashing Christmas lights. One wall bears a large silhouette of a Spanish-style mission, filled in with a painting of a luminous sunset. An enlarged photograph of a hand also appears, as does a red, foil-covered cross, hanging from the ceiling and dangling long red ribbons.

The most engaging aspect of the installation is a wall covered with strips of paper, each bearing a question taken from a 17th-Century catechism and exam for those taking Holy Communion or from a 16th-Century confessionary. “Have you decorated yourself with evil intent so that someone desires you and has you?” “Perchance, have you touched yourself with pleasure?” “When the devil brings lewd thoughts to your mind, do you cast them out quickly, or do you linger in them, or do you consent to them?”

The equation of physical pleasure with evil pervades all of the questions, and some of these centuries-old queries not only remain central to the church’s teachings but also have found new life on the witness stand at rape trials. Bermudes highlights this line of questioning, but his presentation carries no implicit or explicit condemnation of it. That judgment is left to viewers, if they have the patience to engage themselves with an installation that offers so little in return, either visually or conceptually.