SIGHTS UP THE COAST : Potent Images : Recent Russian poster art fills galleries at Westmont College and the Contemporary Arts Forum with satire and agitprop.

The Russians have come to Santa Barbara, with potent poster art heralding a culture’s--and a nation’s--current transition period.

“Glasnost, Perestroika, Democracy: the Coup and After” is a voluminous display of works virtually consuming all the available wall space at the Westmont College Art Gallery, and spilling over into the Contemporary Arts Forum in downtown Santa Barbara.

Taken as a whole, the pieces present a portrait of a nation in turmoil but also high on hope. They bemoan Soviet life under Communist rule and deride Stalinism along with the neo-Stalinist ideologies of the recent coup attempt.

Drawn from the collection of Tom Ferris of the California Institute for Russian Studies, these posters (actually, they are original paintings from which posters are made) serve as acidic satire, as agitprop and often, not incidentally, as fertile artworks in their own right.

Good posters are loaded with messages, digestible at a glance. Simple, bold imagery that taps into familiar archetypes can trigger immediate responses. For Russians, this art hits home. For the rest of us, it is educational and exotic.

By definition, posters are very culture-specific. The image of a famous ‘30s sculpture of a Russian couple brandishing a hammer and sickle is handily defaced and given new symbolism by artist A. Rezaev.

In “Soviet Gulliver,” the couple--and communism at large--are brought down by proletariat Lilliputians. In another poster that deals with acquired immune deficiency syndrome, the artist’s couple are an unwitting emblem of safe sex, carrying condoms.

Political leaders are familiar game for these poster artists, as in “Kremlin Games,” with faces of leaders on billiard balls, going down in the corner pocket. In M. Rozhdestvin’s “?” Gorbachev and Stalin arm wrestle, ideologies in conflict.

Gorbachev, while generally viewed as a positive figure in the ranks of leaders, is the target in Rezaev’s “Inflated (or false) Reformer.” Gorbachev is seen floating away from a fraying U.S.S.R. on balloons of his own reformist policies, tossing away his rubles and off to tour the Free World.

The atrocities of old, especially the despotic and genocidal Stalinist era, which peaked in 1937, are a common target. Stalin’s face is seen on a cover of “Mein Kampf” in Alexander Vaganov’s poster, while Rezaev’s “Meat Grinder” depicts the human meat parade under Stalin’s rein of terror.

“The Church Lights the Darkness,” by Alexander Petrovich Utkins, features the gold-topped onion-shaped dome of a Russian orthodox church peeking out of the labyrinth of an urban skyline. Amid its ominous gray tones, Alexander Lozenko’s “Creator” portrays a figure with Lenin’s face, playing God as a cruel manipulator of human fate.

The poster collection continues at CAF, where the sampling includes the self-explanatory “Metal Dove with Party Slogans,” and “The Last Horse,” a requiem for nature depicting a foal vainly trying to suckle an equestrian statue.

These images are not subtle. But they add up to an important body of work that collectively offers a feel for what it is like to live under a political system that doesn’t have the interests of its populace in mind.

Of course, politically oriented posters could have the same potency coming from any of the world’s corners, anywhere artists are able to articulate in strong, accessible terms the sting of oppression.

Love, Art and Other Foibles

From another perspective entirely, CAF’s principle exhibition at the moment is the four-person show “Love and other (fatal) attractions,” a kind of artful Valentine’s Day massacre.

The show’s title says it: these artists traffic in the stuff of love and melodrama, mucking around, in their disparate ways, in the realm of the romantic. Always, though, elements of sabotage and subterfuge separate the art from the purely purple.

Cindy Evans’ small oil-on-wood paintings are based on multiple meanings and devilish innuendoes. Two views of love’s “torch” with a nude couple evoke overtones of sadomasochism with the torch representing both a romantic heat source and pleasure-giving pain.

By contrast, Mark Stock shows large, seemingly simple realistic portraits of folks in dubious stances. In these images, which seem like shots plucked out of context from old movies, what’s “off-screen” gives the pieces their enigmatic buzz.

In “Perla,” a woman stands on a precipice peering over the edge, whether in admiration of the view or just before jumping, we’re not sure. “The Butler’s in Love” is a creepy voyeuristic scene of a butler eavesdropping and coveting his lady’s visage. Or so it would seem.

Irene Segalove is a coy conceptual artist who tells stories, in peculiar ways. Here, large, framed texts relate short anecdotes from the diary of a young woman’s sexual awakening. Deadpan humor coats her art like a fine veneer.

Texan photographer Nic Nicosia’s hand-colored prints, his “Love and Lust” series, also relish the idea of unexplained narratives. His figures are in the midst of encounters in the dark and/or behind closed doors, with furtiveness and frustration hovering in the air. You, the viewer, supply the story line.

In the back gallery, British painter John Walker’s small paintings occupy an aesthetic far removed from any of the other art on display. Vivid brushwork and visceral energy enliven his strange pieces, with a monolithic icon--such as a boot or a barren tree trunk--treated in multiple variations.

Valentine’s Day, and related matters, are the furthest thing from the heart of Walker’s beguiling quasi-abstractions.

* WHERE AND WHEN

* “Glasnost, Perestroika, Democracy: the Coup and After,” through March 31 at Westmont College’s Reynolds Gallery, 955 Las Paz Road in Santa Barbara. For more information, call 565-6162.

* “Love and other (fatal) attractions,” Russian Posters, and John Walker’s “Small Paintings,” through March 27 at Contemporary Arts Forum, 653 Paseo Nuevo in Santa Barbara. For more information, call 966-5373.