SIGHTS AROUND TOWN : Piece of the Puzzle : The V2 Gallery opens at the Livery Arts Center with a show ranging from corporate art to surrealism.

With this month’s opening of the V2 Gallery, Ventura’s Livery Arts Center comes one step closer to being just what its title promises--a center for the arts in a town with a pronounced desire for cultural centering.

Ringing the courtyard alongside the Momentum Gallery, the Performance Studio and the Plaza Players Theater, the V2 Gallery provides one more piece of the Livery puzzle. Though not a large space, V2’s high ceilings afford ample exhibition space, and the open door policy invites foot traffic and dialogue with the neighboring arts spaces.

Director and founder Wyndra Roche returns to the Livery after being involved with the Palm Street Gallery, which closed its doors earlier this year. She then worked with Art City II. V2 is a gallery of her own, showing artists whose works have been seen at Roche’s previous haunts.

The inaugural show is a diverse affair with no particular curatorial party line, featuring artists running the stylistic gamut from corporate art to graphics to surrealism to cheeky assemblage art.

One familiar figure in the Old Town art scene is the prolific, irrepressible Charles Fulmer. A painter of rugged strength and a sculptor who loves the rippling mass of marble, Fulmer searches for choice chunks of stone in the California desert and paints scenes of ritualistic release.

In short, he’s a desert monger in the best sense, tapping into a certain manic, cathartic energy on the outskirts of society. In a few newer paintings, rock quarry scenes are peopled with primitive nudes, transformed by the spirit of the place.

We also see what the artist says are the last of his strangely appealing “Dog Series,” in which mongrels and women pose. The small paintings have a campy air of decadence, as if painted from stills for anthropomorphic B movies.

Omar d’Leon’s delicate and entrancing work provides a point of radical contrast from Fulmer’s rough-hewn surfaces. Small, tidy, and mystical, d’Leon’s paintings convey a naturalistic surrealism reminiscent of Paul Klee.

He walks a fine line between realism and irrationality. Bulbous figures float in ambiguous space in “The Bathers.” What might seem to be convergence of abstract forms in “Blue Boat” is actually an overhead view of reclining boaters.

Every group show needs a class clown, and here the role is filled by punk-pop artist Doug Lipton. Lipton’s satchel of materials includes plastic toy dolls, a chandelier, a small Edward Hopper reproduction, religious icons, and a tiny plastic golfer on an Astroturf tongue (“A Taste for Golf”).

Thematically, he often wags a finger at American complacency and religious guilt. “Guilt” is a mini-shrine bearing the punch line “the gift that keeps on giving.” Excessive cleverness can be a trap, but at his best, Lipton is a lighthearted tinkerer who prods the status quo.

Of the current V2 bunch, Gerard Drouillard comes off as the resident slickster, the artist whose work is the most likely to find its way onto the walls of banks and finer offices everywhere. His big-stroked designs and shaped-canvas pieces wallow in metaphor-free surface fetish.

Rob Beckett’s ironic seascapes and kitschy odes to sea life were seen in the final stages of the Palm Street Gallery. But here his most impressive work is intriguingly unaccountable, neither fish nor fowl.

Crisp depictions of ambiguous animal matter seem to be taken from somewhere between the microscopic realm, the undersea world and the cosmos. The title of Beckett’s work “Micro Orgasmic Carnival” sums up the fantastic quirkiness of his best work.

While Richard Schaefer’s brooding abstractions made a strong impression at Art City II a few months back, at V2 he is showing earlier realistic paintings of Africa, where the artist spent time.

The small paintings transcend mere National Geographic-brand exoticism by virtue of their cryptic composition and muted light schemes. The lone rhino in “Nocturne” seems to be contemplating the meaning of the universe, or his next meal. Or both.

A brave new contender in a volatile art scene, the V2 Gallery is off to a good, running start.

Gleeful spirit: Maggie Yee’s works at the Ventura Government Center, involving photography, serigraphy, collage and other techniques, swim in a spirit of glee, giddiness and, at times, silliness. The silliness is written all over the face of a grinning man in sunglasses, hands on the wheel of hedonistic abandon.

But Yee is onto something. Of particular interest is a scene of suburbia with a trail of consumerist debris--TV, clothes, white bread--sweeping the night sky over this all-American scene. In another piece, a star-struck ballerina is seen aswim in a glittery swirl of abstraction.

Yee works on an original fringe, between the decorative, the cosmic, and the satirical.

Bold contrasts: Over at the Ventura County National Bank, there is another fine study in contrast, between the heated art of our Russian-in-Ojai Slava Sukhorukov and the more benign pictorialism of Gloria Todd Jones.

Todd Jones has an engagingly relaxed style of figuration, as her light-spirited scenes of young musicians and the jazz-related still-life “September Jazz” attest. “Treasures of a Lifestyle” fuses simple, everyday scenes into a calm self-portrait, focusing on the common objects surrounding the self in question.

Sukhorukov’s work--taking on political corruption and spiritual malaise, heaven and hell, and the whole shootin’ match--is often seen around the area, making it easy to check his progress.

He lifts ideas straight out of both the Bible (“Daniel’s Dream”) and Playboy magazine, from which nude shots were borrowed for “Russian Chess” and “Prostitution of Revolution.”

There is something melodramatic about Sukhorukov’s expanding body of work. At the same time, his obvious surrealistic instincts keep him on the poetic side of the fence between aesthetic fulmination and socio-political rage.

* WHERE AND WHEN

* Art by Rob Becket, Omar d’Leon, Girard Drouillard, Charles Fulmer, and Richard Schaefer at V2 Gallery, 34 N. Palm St., in Ventura, through May 31.

* Maggie Yee, at the County Government Center, 800 S. Victoria Ave., in Ventura, through May 21.

* Gloria Todd Jones, Slava Sukhorukov at the Ventura County National Bank, 500 Esplanade Drive, in Oxnard, through June 12.