Two-Artist Show Draws on Contrasts : Art: Two very different drawing styles are on display at Palomar College’s Boehm Gallery.

Two artists with very different drawing styles are sharing space at Palomar College’s Boehm Gallery.

Leslie Nemour’s large pastels are realist renderings. Mari Omari’s graphite drawings are abstract. One would think that this juxtaposition might create some kind of visual or thematic conflict. But because each show is made up of well-executed and challenging works, we find an interesting balance. Neither artist outshines the other. The different styles push us to think even more about the individual messages and their techniques for communicating them.

Nemour’s narrative drawings, “Cuerpos y Almas/Bodies and Souls,” are inspired by folkloric dichos (proverbs) and Mexican novellas (soap operas in a comic book format). Because her pictorial format is also based on that of the novellas, her drawings, which are divided in either horizontal or vertical frames, are filled with symbolic imagery.

Most of Nemour’s works reflect sexual and religious stereotypes, but her roomful of drawings avoids redundancy.

“Dios Aprietas/God Squeezes” is a commentary on everyday life. In a wonderful two-panel pattern that juxtaposes a stepped pyramid and basement steps, we visualize the frustrations of heavenly quest and earthly realities.

Because so much is going on in Nemour’s art, the works are most successful when they are large. Her smaller drawings have less impact and often appear too obvious. In “Hot Imagination,” for example, Nemour puts the ankles of a woman wearing high heels next to a burning sun.

By contrast to the accessibility of Nemour’s work, Omari’s show, “Black Drawings,” is difficult to take in. This is not only because they are not narrative, but also because the symbols she uses--grids, numbers and Japanese characters--are allusive.

Her main concerns are the balancing of absence and presence and the marking of time and place. Omari says this is an attempt to reconcile her rigid Japanese upbringing with the looser lifestyle of the United States, where she has lived since the late 1970s.

The title, “Black Drawings,” alludes to the dominant color of her work, divided here into two series. The powerful “Black Rain” series uses the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to reflect man’s imposing his will on nature. (This show was previously exhibited in 1990 at Southwestern College.) Her “Otherness” drawings, smaller in scale and not as rigid, suggest terrains and vistas.

In “Otherness/Moonrise-2,” she continues to use the grid format and ancient Japanese characters that distinguish her art. Only in this instance, she has added a curved line to indicate a rising moon.

Overall, the second half of her show reflects a more harmonious relationship between man and nature.

* Leslie Nemour’s “Cuerpos y Almas/Bodies and Souls” and Mari Omari’s “Black Drawings” can be seen at Palomar College Boehm Gallery, 1140 W. Mission Road, San Marcos, through March 4. Hours are 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Tuesday, 10 a.m-7 p.m. Wednesday-Thursday, 10 a.m.-2 p.m. Friday, and noon-4 p.m. Saturday. The Gallery is closed Feb. 14-15.

A Tasende Gallery print exhibition, simply titled “A Graphic Presentation by Gallery Artists,” features eight distinct artists. The majority have made some kind of mark on 20th-Century art, and, with a few exceptions, are known as sculptors.

Because both the style and the number of pieces by each artist vary (there is only one work by Marino Marini yet nine by Jose Luis Cuevas), the safest thing to say about the exhibition is that it quickly provides a great overview of a few artists who influenced mid-century art.

With the exception of those artists who primarily work in a two-dimensional medium, anyway, such as the surrealist painter Echaurren Matta, social commentator Jose Luis Cuevas or pop artist Tom Wesselmann, few of the works communicate the artist’s individual strengths.

For example, Italian sculptor Giacomo Manzu, known for his series of cardinals, has two mundane etchings that reflect typical turn-of-the-century subject matter rather than his particular style. “La Balance” is an overdone rendition of a woman on a swing, and “Due Amanti III” is just another depiction of two naked and disheveled reclining lovers.

Ruben Nakian’s two prints also depict a subject matter that was typical for most early 20th-Century artists. “Nymph and Goat” and “Leda and the Swan” are facile renditions of these classical myths.

A few sculptors, however, managed to represent graphically their three-dimensional artistic concerns.

In the brightly colored print “Chevaux et Cavaliers IV,” Marino Marini was able to re-create the tension between vertical, horizontal or diagonal masses generally found in his sculptures.

And Spanish sculptor Chillida, who is known for his massive works that suggest space and the relationships of objects in space, manages to reconstruct this artistic endeavor in two prints. One in particular, “Euzkadu V,” is a wonderful etching of two irregular and opposing rectangular shapes that appear as if they are floating on the gray background.

Except for Cuevas, whose art thrives on social commentary, most of these artists were trained in realism and then moved toward the formal concerns that came to dominate the art scene in the ‘30s, ‘40s and ‘50s.

It is interesting to note how different this is from the current art scene, in which artists are concerned with much more than just formal issues.

Andres Nagel (the youngest and least-known artist of this group) not only mocks classical subject matter--seen in the prints that depict public sculpture in his native city of San Sebastian, Spain--but, more than the others, he uses his art as a form of commentary.

The series “Red Like Coca-Cola,” a depiction of a vertical foot emerging from a horizontal shoe, could be commenting on everything from athletic advertisements to the soft drink to the new political order in Eastern Europe.

At Tasende Gallery, 820 Prospect St., La Jolla, through Feb. 25. Hours are 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday.