SIGHTS AROUND SANTA BARBARA : Sayonara, Puccinelli : Deft collage creations constitute a last hurrah for Carpinteria gallery closing its doors at the end of November.

Flux has always played a role in the art gallery landscape in Santa Barbara. The cultural lifeblood runs fairly hot; meanwhile, the market is marginal. It may always be thus--a lopsided ratio of energy and response.

All of which is a rational way to consider the recent comings--and goings--in Santa Barbara art circles.

Sadly, the “going” refers to Francis Puccinelli’s gallery in Carpinteria, one of the more consistently inspiring art spaces in Santa Barbara County. The current show, up through November, will be the last.

A pleasantly atmospheric upstairs space, with picture window views of the surrounding beach-and-mountain terrain, the Puccinelli Gallery cut a handsome image for an art venue. More important, of course, was the work: Puccinelli has a sharp eye for work along the lines of folk and outsider art.

In January, Puccinelli completed renovations on the gallery, involving both earthquake modifications and an extension of the space. Everything seemed to work about the gallery. Everything except the fiscal flow.

Standing in her gallery, which will close at the end of November, Puccinelli reasoned, “I was sorry to let it go, but it has been almost three years now. I have no regrets.” She plans to continue dealing in outsider art and may do guest curating.

Puccinelli’s exhibition last hurrah is a fitting one. Lynn Bennett and Robin Ghelerter are Los Angeles-based artists whose surface differences disguise their commonalities.

Both work deftly in the collage medium, but with separate approaches and intentions. Both tap into a sense of naive, borrowed folk culture, and their work conveys an almost primitive quality of festivity.

Bennett works more directly out of the cut-and-paste school of collage, using scraps from old magazines to create what might be called nostalgia-kitsch. Rich with imagery lifted out of the seemingly more innocent epoch of the ‘40s, Bennett’s aesthetic carries with it a fondness for pre-existential culture.

But hers is not a superficial crafts project. The very strategy of “hunting and gathering” imagery, as she explains in a statement; her clever use of unfolded cake boxes as a kind of found, shaped-canvas; and her shrewd compositioning of these once ingenuous pictures, suggest that a post-modernist is lurking within a child-like wonder.

Ghelerter assembles her pieces from scraps of flat color planes, creating whimsical artifacts that look neo-tropical, neo-primitive, neo-neo. Fantastical sea, space and mythical figures are awash in gently surreal settings.

Hints of unrest pop up amid the general mood of giddiness. A woman stands on the world in “I’m Lost and I Don’t Know What to Do.” Another frowning woman stands, naked and alone, in front of her vanity in “Another Young Girl in Search of Love.”

But these are just half-smirking notes of dismay in a gallery mostly free of chic despair or angst. Shameless delight blows like a gentle breeze through the place, a gallery that has often been known for its shameless delight.

It was awfully nice while it lasted.

Ringing in the New

Meanwhile, another gallery has recently been born in Santa Barbara. The Guernica Gallery of Graphic Arts began as a literally home-grown operation a decade ago, when UCSB professor and art collector Ellis Engelsberg decided to show political art at his home in the depths of the Goleta suburbs.

Last month, Engelsberg opened up in his expanded quarters, in a sizable space next to the old, now-defunct Arpel Gallery on Micheltorena. (The fine Arpel Gallery was another victim of gallery attrition.)

The new space is a study in the resourceful use of existing space, which stretches vertically more than horizontally.

This former hair salon has been transformed into a modular gallery. An upstairs is devoted to a healthy international collection of poster art, mostly of a political and/or ecological nature. A few stations downstairs, where once locks were shorn, have been given over to featured artists.

On the main wall this month is lithography by the Israeli-born French artist Theo Tobiasse, who died last year. With obvious echoes of the folkish surrealism of Marc Chagall and Paul Klee, Tobiasse’s work is at once enchanted and massive in scale.

Outskirts

Not all the art worth seeing in Santa Barbara hangs on gallery walls. Art makes its way into cafes and other commercial spaces. And what we find there isn’t always wallflower art, to be seen but not considered.

Take, for instance, the Espresso Roma Cafe on State Street. A quasi-Bohemian meeting place, the Roma has been known to festoon its tall walls with art of a loud, outlandish sort.

Currently, Bay Area artists Dolf Shearer and Dino Columbo are showing their looming, darkly ironic images. Theirs is a kind of neo-Pop art gone mad. Two of the topics that evoke their madness are military machinery and the meat industry.

Eloquent odes to hogs and poultry mix with such images as “AmeriKKKa’s Naziburger Yellowribbon Freaks,” a pointed stab at Gulf War-era jingoism.

And over at the Wine Connection, Russian-painter-in-Ojai Slava Sukhorukov spices up the wine outlet with his own heated polemics, religious asides and freewheeling surrealism.

In his first Santa Barbara showing, Sukhorukov serves up a generous sampling of his paintings, most of which have been seen at various locales in Ventura County. All that’s missing are his pristine religious icon paintings. Maybe it seemed improper to mix religion and revelry.

You find art in the strangest places these days. Galleries come and go. Art finds its way onto bare walls in unexpected niches. Go figure.

* WHERE AND WHEN

* Lynn Bennett and Robin Ghelerter, through November at Francis Puccinelli Gallery, 888 Linden Ave. in Carpinteria, upstairs. 684-6301

* Lithographs by Tobiasse, through November at the Guernica Gallery of Graphic Arts, 32 E. Micheltorena St. in Santa Barbara. 965-5565

* Slava Sukhorukov, through December at the Wine Connection, 33 W. Anapamu St. Opening reception, Saturday from 5 to 8 p.m. 568-5367

* Dolf Shearer and Dino Columbo, through November at Espresso Roma, 728 State St. 962-4721.