SIGHTS : Original Art Doesn’t Mind Its Manners : Works by two Bulgarians at Wheeler Hot Springs are a far cry from the bland decorations at most restaurants.

If the notion of restaurant art inspires visions of purposefully diluted, mild-spirited work--a kind of polite visual padding for your dining experience--there may be a surprise in store at Wheeler Hot Springs this month. Notable Bulgarian sculptor-cum-painter Stavri Kalinov, whose work is on view in the dining room, would seem incapable of producing art that minds its manners or takes things lightly.

His large, multifaceted pieces combine swollen figures or other forms serving as vessels for minute, intricate linear imagery. A sense of microscopic activity and swirling biomorphic stimuli buzz about in his art, less innocent than a cursory glance might suggest. This is a life-or-death art, of the sort that North American artists shy away from, and whose freshness demands a look.

Biblical themes run hot in Kalinov’s iconography, as in “Genesis,” a cracked vase decorated with ornamental flourish and symbolic visions of animalia. Vicious fish--toothy piranhas are a recurring theme in this show--spill out from the bottom, as apparitional female forms sail out of the top, in what cagily presents itself as a creationist premise.

For all the appearance of reckless abandon in these pieces, balance of elements is critical to Kalinov, who creates art at once outlandish and refined, primitivist and polished. He likes his surfaces tactile, scraped and etched, iced with glossy touches like the decorations on ceramic artifacts.

Sinister and sometimes overly dogmatic issues thrust into Kalinov’s not-so benign images. “The Egg” bursts with vulnerable life, protected from the darker tissue layers of outside influences. “Woman on Horseback” is a quasi- bestial scenario with a woman entwined with a Trojan horse on a de Chirico wooden floor.

Subtlety isn’t always on Kalinov’s side. In “Love and Money,” a Klimt-esque couple is literally locked in embrace against a backdrop of money.

Vis-a-vis the artist’s all-inclusive tendency, his work “Everything Under the Sun” may be a personal archetype of sorts. We find a chaotic ball, aflame, hurtling through space, leaving a vapor trail of mortal debris. If Kalinov’s work weren’t so laced with humor and rugged vitality, it might be existentially harrowing.

In the bar area at Wheeler, fellow Bulgarian artist Tsveti Kirov shows art that, on the face of it, at least, is simpler and of a more direct temperament. An arid surrealism flecks Kirov’s small, nicely evocative and deceptively tidy landscapes, with crystallize states of emotional being.

Less effective are Kirov’s shamelessly Francis Baconesque nods. “Lover’s Quarrel” and “Woman in Turmoil” ape Bacon’s depiction of inner torment in the form of smeared figures, splashing their unruly emotional states all over rooms. These understated landscapes come closest to the casual nature we expect of art in a dining area of any work currently hanging in the restaurant. But, even here, desolate undercurrents tell another story, on close inspection.

EROTIC ART REDUX DEPT.:

Undercurrents and overstatements coexist, with relative happiness, in the current smattering of erotic art down the road at the G. Childress Gallery in Ojai. Eros and erotic art are not strangers to the gallery, and the current show, “The Pleasures of Looking: Romantic and Sensual Art,” exemplifies the highs and lows of the erotic impulse in an art exhibition setting.

F. Fallick (a pseudonym, perhaps?) presents the small porcelain sculpture, “Love on the Rocks,” a not-at-all-shy or timid depiction of lovers in mid-grope. It seems to satirize those kitschy figurines you might find on Aunt Mildred’s mantle, except that Mildred would have nothing to do with this brand of 3-D smut.

From a more discreet perspective, we see Gretchen Greenberg’s “Gazing Women,” amorphous serpent-like entities that could be viewed as either phallic symbols or lean, abstracted female figures, or something in between. It is the between state that seems to be the artist’s coy objective.

The finest art here is Jan Sanchez’ “Gilded Goddesses--Female Empowered,” a ritualistic assemblage piece revealing a goddess studded with nails, levitating off a shelf attached to an easel. Linda Smith’s “Dream Two” depicts a dream of a nocturnal and ghostly lover, in an effectively naive painterly style. On more salaciously witty turf, Paul Beully’s sculpture “Creation” lavishes images of sperm and post-coital cigarette onto a dresser.

Not everything in the gallery upholds the fragile values of erotic art finery. The photography on view tends toward an anti-aesthetic stance. Reinhard’s odes to derrieres, in the mild 3-D of resin-cast buttocks, relies on wink-wink nudge-nudge humor. The relevance of Jacquelyn Cavish’s “Banana Gardens,” beyond a knee-jerk sexual reference, isn’t clear.

But then, tucked into the corners of the gallery, are B. Kaderly’s simple line drawings, whose curvilinear gestures suggest physical forms with none of the rush to define sexual energy so prevalent in some other pieces in the show. Kaderly flings a few casual sensuous lines into the mix, introducing a beguiling sparseness into a world that sometimes tends to leave nothing from nothing.

Details

* WHO: Stavri Kalinov and Tsveti Kirov.

* WHEN: Through April 23.

* WHERE: Wheeler Hot Springs, 16825 Maricopa Highway, Ojai.

* HOW MUCH: Free.

* CALL: 646-8131.