Ins and Outs of Artist’s Varied Work

Seeing the bold imagery of Frank Hyder in the climate-controlled confines of the Carnegie Art Museum is one thing. Venturing out of the gallery is another. But this is one of those gallery shows that inspires you to see his art in a public place.

At the Carnegie, we find a sampling of the “indoor” art of the Philadelphia-based Hyder, but he is also responsible for the mural across town, next to the Terminal Freezer property at 908 E. 3rd St., sponsored by the Oxnard Art in Public Places Project. On an otherwise drab, workaday stretch of road in an industrial section of Oxnard, a long brick wall serves as a public canvas for the Hyder mural.

An intriguing and refreshingly subtle mural broken into nine discrete panels, it depicts a slice of life in a Venezuelan fishing village, and was inspired by the artist’s visits with the Yamomamin Indians in Caracas, Venezuela. Formally, the panels draw a visual correlation and a sense of rhythm among scenes of canoes, fish and fingers.

In an effort to command attention and compete with images on the commercial landscape, mural artists sometimes overstate their case, with epic scale, exaggerated imagery and loud color palettes. With Hyder’s work, an attentive, patient eye is required: It doesn’t track well from the perspective of a moving car--unless you’re moving so slow as to obstruct traffic.

Meanwhile, back at the Carnegie, the exhibition “Behind the Murals of Frank Hyder” further demonstrates the artist’s assured efforts in finding common ground between art-world image-making and a native source of inspiration.

In the upstairs gallery, Hyder’s fare includes large works on paper with his typical microscopic affection for detail, abstracting familiar sights and finding poetry in the everyday.

Up close, “Caeruia Umtae” appears to be an abstract image comprising tangled, vein-like strands. Step back and the image of a broadly drawn face becomes apparent. “Domain” is a triptych portraying aspects of Amazon life.

In his indoor and outdoor work, Hyder seems to have mastered the delicate art of generating images that speak clearly--in big, crisp terms--while still being poetically charged. He brings along a useful message, about the importance of maintaining cultural and community roots--especially in a domain as fragile as the rain forest or, for that matter, in the hurly-burly of the global village.

Metaphysical Terms: Also at the Carnegie, but reflecting a different sensibility entirely, is “Container/Content,” an ambitious show of paintings by Hamid Zavareei, a Costa Mesa resident who immigrated from Iran. As the title suggests, Zavareei is interested in the dualities of definition, between the container and the contained, the concrete and the symbolic.

A self-proclaimed “mystical realist,” Zavareei often relies on the surrealistic devices of blending disparate objects, shifting spatial relationships and generally undermining the rudiments of physical logic. In other words, he’s after a dream realm, in ways that translate to Westernized viewers with varying success.

His paintings are populated by hooded, faceless monks and poets, sentinel-like wolves and talismanic, glowing planks, which may put some in mind of the monolithic slab in the movie “2001: A Space Odyssey.”

A wisp of humor comes through in “Cleansing the Space,” in which robed ascetics perch on mysterious, shelf-like protrusions and dangle incense, cleansing the space.

Underlying Zavareei’s work are the spiritual and aesthetic issues--searching for God and/or the muse. Inspiration may arrive in the form of a trickle, like the dripping paint rivulets of “And the Poet Received,” or the mysterious red fluid dripping from a caldron in “The Container Paradox,” with a turbaned seeker gazing longingly from within a dank stone cathedral.

One of the more striking paintings here is “Bequest of the Source,” a looming image of a stone vessel, levitating slightly, affecting in its monumental simplicity.

Even when his art suggests contrivance or easy effects, sincerity shines through. Zavareei wants to put into artistic terms the unquenchable desire for inspiration, and the uncertainty of recognizing its face.

“Behind the Murals of Frank Hyder” and “Container/Content,” by Hamid Zavareei, through Feb. 25, at the Carnegie Art Museum, 424 S. C St. in Oxnard. 385-8157.