ART REVIEW : Valdez’s Morbid Vision of Domesticity

Where tiny voodoo dolls lurk under tables nicely set for tea, shattered glasses gush wine as red as blood, spoons are bent Uri Geller-style, goldfish bowls are all aquiver and chairs float off the ground, the comforts of home and hearth smell suspiciously like putrefying memories.

In Patssi Valdez’s morbid vision of domesticity, the traditional province of the feminine has been colonized by dis-ease . Naturalism is waylaid by the lure of the fantastic, and reality is transposed into artifice without a backward glance. These screaming acrylic paintings sidestep the numbing familiarity of the middle ground in order to reach around and embrace the extreme--however sharp or caustic.

In “Broken,” a table set with a billowing mustard-colored cloth and a blood-stained set of implements is poised against a blue wall, ripped partially open to reveal a viscous, crimson interior. A massive portrait of a red-lipped, blue-faced woman, her hand stroking her chin and her eyes cast sideways, presides over the scene like a primordial goddess of confusion.

What is strange here is not just the imagery, but the complete lack of air. The flattened space of these paintings is drained of any vestiges of illusionism, articulated not through plays of light and shadow but with patches of high-keyed color, laid side by side to create scenes of nearly suffocating intensity.

Valdez’s work has been most often seen in the context of Latino and/or Chicano art. Indeed, it is tempting to assimilate her predilection for bright colors and supernatural iconography into what has been for too long a marginalized ethnic identity and aesthetic. But for the work of Valdez, as for that of other “minority artists,” it is crucial to consider other contexts.

Here the dominant motif of 10 out of 14 paintings is the table with still-life objects. It links Valdez’s work to Picasso’s Cubist compositions--a connection Valdez acknowledges in “Chile and Cafe,” where bits of newsprint from The Times are collaged directly onto the canvas.

More significant is Valdez’s debt to Matisse, from the collapse of space into broad planes of color to the persistence of certain decorative tropes: the goldfish bowl, the wrought-iron chair, the picture window. “The Blue Room,” in fact, looks to be a direct play on Matisse’s famous “Red Room” of 1908-09. In Matisse’s painting, however, the landscape visible outside the open window is linked chromatically and structurally with the interior scene; in Valdez’s image, it is not. The naturalistic tones and perspectively accurate view of the house and bushes beyond contrast with the vertiginous angles of the hypnotically blue-tinged room.

It is as if Valdez is slyly demonstrating that the world inside her mind is infinitely more compelling than the rather ordinary world outside, where the rest of us live. These resplendent paintings--bizarre but unexpectedly seductive--suggest that quite probably she is right.

Daniel Saxon Gallery, 7525 Beverly Blvd., (213) 933-5282; ends April 4. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Nowhere to Hide: Twisting, turning, writhing and cowering, the figures in David Limrite’s drawings and paintings at John Thomas Gallery are suffused with an anguish peculiar to a specific time and place.

Like Robert Longo’s well-known “Men in the Cities” images--urban dervishes whirling about in B-movie Angst --Limrite’s men are at pains to hide their identities. They bury their faces in the shadows or in the dark shirts they are perpetually peeling off. They have been made anonymous and so they have learned to seek anonymity. What Limrite draws for us is a brutal picture of life at the end of the 20th Century.

Yet, unlike Longo’s portraits of utter disaffection, the figures Limrite sketches are not without hope. Whereas the “Men in the Cities” resignedly wear the (strait)jackets and ties of corporate America, Limrite’s men are all bare-chested, caught in the process of undressing--a handy metaphor for self-disclosure.

This process, however, is difficult and necessarily fraught with pain, thus the contorted postures and the irony of obscuring one’s face while attempting to reveal one’s soul.

In “Re-Establishing Equilibrium,” a man reels backward. In “Delusion of Reprieve,” he pitches forward--both with a violence that suggests motion forcibly stilled and desire impossibly frustrated. What activates these frozen images, and this work as a whole, is the nervous energy of Limrite’s strokes, vibrating around the figures like turbocharged halos--quick, impassioned, relentless.

Longo is the consummate artist of a late capitalist culture. He revels in the cool touch of the machine. That Limrite militates against this is palpable in his highly expressionistic technique, his insistence upon the hand of the artist. This assertion of the personal in the face of the triumph of the impersonal becomes a powerful index of optimism. His works demonstrate that, even within a corpus dying as quickly as this century, there are still sharp glimmers of life.

John Thomas Gallery, 602 Colorado Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 396-6096; ends April 11. Closed Mondays .