SIGHTS UP THE COAST : A Bittersweet Story : A lavish exhibit of Latin American art and antiques documents the meeting of old world and new.

To fully appreciate the powerful and inarguably impressive “Cambios” exhibition at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art is to take the bitter with the sweet.

The sweet is obvious. There’s little question that this rare gathering of paintings, tapestries, furniture and other artifacts from Latin America of several hundred years ago satisfies the senses--especially with the lavish portrayals and celebrations of aristocracy and Christian iconography.

The intent of this ambitious exhibition is to demonstrate a sense of cambios --transforming change--that occurred when the Spanish took control of Mexico and Peru in the 1500s and the old world met with the new.

But the other, unstated and somewhat bitter side of the story isn’t so blithe: It is a subplot of conquest and cultural pillage, more than one of synthesis.

This show tells the tale of how the Spaniards set up shop in “the new land,” bringing with them the cultural, religious and aesthetic baggage of the old world. They came to colonize, to “civilize”--which is a dangerous verb that can be tinged with violence and inhumanity.

For the most part, the art and artifacts here are for the glory of God and/or the Catholic church. Incan culture is virtually subsumed.

Once you get past this queasy aspect of the show, “Cambios” is an embarrassment of riches presented in a thoughtful multimedia format. Period music softly plays as you walk past elaborate tapestries, antique furniture and a wall full of large crucifixions.

The paintings are either celestial or aristocratic in nature, with beatific expressions all around. All eyes are haughty or heavenward. The dense and lush “Our Lady of Lidon,” painted by Melchor Perez Holquin in 1716, depicts a Latino-looking Virgin surrounded by swarming angels suspended on the Christ child.

All that seems to be missing from the exhibit is any particular sense of cultural conscience.

You walk out of the museum onto State Street and into a town architecturally tethered to a Spanish Colonial Revival motif, dizzied by the idea of how to define heritage.

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At the “Jerry Kearns: Deep Cover” show at the UCSB Art Museum, the matters of scale and context are not to be taken lightly. These are definitively larger-than-life paintings, with denser-than-life resonance.

At the same time, the arid wit and the avoidance of cheap theatrics keep these pieces from overstatement. Kearns’ sense of theater is made up of cross-referencing and layering. There is never a dull, single-minded moment.

In Kearns’ massive paintings, comic book characters loom, weighed with ironic importance.

News photos create a blurred backdrop and a sobering subtext.

Tidbits of fine art, Hollywood mythology and other appropriated images are woven into provocative blends.

Kearns is a card-carrying, avid collagist, who relies on the power of separate and usually contrasting images. But there is strange logic at work too. In “Scarlet Fever,” a dancer’s elegant arch-backed posture mirrors the gesture of a stubbly gunslinger who has just taken a bullet. Campy pain and bad guy comeuppance meets kinetic ecstasy.

Kearns earned his MFA at UCSB in 1968 and has since tilled a rich artistic life: as a sculptor turned conceptualist, activist, teacher (at Amherst, since 1971) and, finally, an artist with a mature sense of purpose.

At a lecture on campus last week, he talked about how he “went to certain spots on campus and waited for something mystical to happen.” He seemed like a man, a little misty around the edges, upon whom nostalgia had visited.

Abrasive as his messages often are, sentiment is not lacking. In sharp contrast to the cool ironic remove of the post-modernists, with whom he is sometimes lumped, Kearns talked about the personal reference points in his work.

There was nothing cool or removed about his discussion of an abusive stepfather, his rapport with significant females in his life or his shameless nostalgia for the childish things of his ‘50s upbringing--including the East Coast comic books from which he steals material for his art.

And just as sex and violence are always near the surface of the American media fabric, so too are they never far from the surface in these paintings.

“Hard Rock” finds a buxom woman in a sheer dress lying, legs open, in front of Mount Rushmore, taunting our patriarchal national heroes. “Foreign Affairs” blends a couple in bed under an image of the Capitol Dome.

In “Naked Brunch” (a cheeky nod to William Burroughs’ novel, “Naked Lunch”) Kearns skewers the American yuppie dream: a depraved couple munch rapaciously on goldfish while the Statue of Liberty is being given a face-lift in the background.

Kearns’ art has more than a passing resemblance to art world movements of our time, from the Pop Art of Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein to the manic postmodern hunt-and-gather aesthetic of Julian Schnabel and David Salle.

But, whatever the surface similarities, Kearns devises his own dialectic by literally joining forces. He sets up contrasting materials in a blueprint for revisionist meaning. He deftly bends our common visual language to suit his own purposes.

The messages are coyly tucked between the cracks.

* WHERE AND WHEN

*Cambios, at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 1130 State St., through Feb. 7. For more information, call 963-4364.

* Jerry Kearns: Deep Cover, at the UCSB Art Museum through Feb. 21. For more information, call 893-2951.