Works Prove She’s No Garden-Variety Artist

In a show she calls “Visions of Color,” at the Orlando Gallery, Gloria Moses goes gleefully over the top, and, at the same time, toward the edge.

She takes as her subject something as ostensibly mundane as the secret life of domestic gardens, but these garden views burst with color and overgrowth, as if the artist is immersed--even drowning--in the foliage. Hers is a painterly approach that celebrates flourish, savoring the suffusion of color and line, almost to excess--but it’s excess with a purpose.

Moses gives just enough visual information to complete the picture of what we’re seeing, to give a sense of place to the house or property to which the plant life “belongs.” And yet, within those boundaries, she cuts loose, getting lost in the thickets of flowers and colorful density.

In these everyday, garden-variety backyard scenes, curious creatures visit or lurk amid the plants, lending a surreal air of ironic innocence. These inert yard pets turn out to be images of ceramic animals--misshapen, big- and bug-eyed critters--fashioned by the artist and strewn about the gallery. They provide a strange three-dimensional complement to the paintings on view, and also supply a thread of continuity between the different media.

The fact that Moses’ show teeters toward outlandishness, taking its broad-stroking attitude seriously, adds up to a strange kind of charm.

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Also showing at Orlando, Ruth Schrier’s set of paintings, under the title “Moon Shadows” veer toward the opposite end of the spectrum, with subtlety and mystery in place of extroversion. Through her muted palette, her experiments in framing, and use of multiple panels, Schrier explores and personalizes the landscape tradition.

Her spare, often arid naturescapes depict stretches where land and water meet in pallid, perhaps moonlit conditions. The bleak, sanded-down features might even suggest lunarscapes. Schrier’s paintings depict somewhat desolate land in odd hours between day and night, and the odd lighting that comes with it.

In “Duskscape,” a series of sand dune forms are characterized by wavy linear elements, defined by the sweep of light at dusk. A narrow, horizontal canvas of turbulent sky sits on top of the main painting, as if supplying an overhead explanatory subplot.

The “Lagoon Mysteries” series typifies the fluidity of Schrier’s art. In a larger work in the series, the sense of space is defined by the division of the rectangular frame into three unevenly-sized panels. In another work, Schrier chops up the image into five separate canvases, arranged in a crude cruciform pattern. By doing so, she imposes a sense of visual rhythm, to dramatic effect.

Not surprisingly, she finds inspiration in the dreamlike natural phenomenon of Mono Lake, the crusty spires of which are flecked by the red light of sunset. An extraterrestrial air hovers over these scenes, even though her work here is almost reportorial in nature.

For the most part, Schrier makes her strongest statement when she finds the elusive balance between reportage and poetic invention. This is art that takes its proud place somewhere between earth, myth and moonlight.

* Gloria Moses and Ruth Schrier at Orlando Gallery, 14553 Ventura Blvd. in Sherman Oaks; (818) 789-6012.

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BEAUTY IN THE MARGINS: A beauty salon by day, Bigoudi International in Woodland Hills has been hanging fine art shows on its ample wall space, testing the common wisdom that art can be appreciated in spaces that are not dedicated as galleries. If the current show is a reliable indication, it’s an effort worth supporting.

Artists Ricardo Duffy and Ernesto de la Loza are Latin American artists from the Los Angeles area whose experiences in mural art have seemingly sharpened their visual wits and defined a sense of aesthetics-writ-large. Duffy is the more overtly socially charged of the pair, as with the immigration satire of his stereotype-baiting “Mexican Mouse/Mickey Mouse.” Here, the giddy Speedy Gonzales represents the would-be border invader who Mickey Mouse, in an INS vehicle with a swastika on the door, seeks to apprehend.

“The Promised Land” is a stylized image of a squalid domicile and a silhouette of an immigrant family in fear and in flight. He tinkers with romantic cliche in “Mi Corazon,” an etching of a literally detached heart. Iconography is also addressed in Loza’s “American Icon,” with its stoic Marlboro Man, lips pursed around a cigarette, with an urban skyline that is like a mirage in the background.

The world inhabited by Loza’s canvases is often one teeming with erotic content, with religious symbols in the margins. His sense of artistic play, at least in this show, is less sparked by social indignation than by a wry imagination. “Ghetto Rooster” depicts said fowl--a hip, street rooster--with a kaleidoscopic, hyperactive color scheme. “L.A. Underwater” features the undulant curves of a nude female sunbather in the foreground, with a beachfront skyline behind, and, overhead, a disorienting hint of undersea life, replete with a skin diver in midair.

If this image were prominently featured in a mural, it might disrupt traffic. Here, it only disrupts business as usual, which is not a bad thing. Art and commerce should butt heads now and again. Suffice to say, this show is not just polite window dressing.

* Ernesto de la Loza and Ricardo Duffy at Bigoudi International, 21720 Ventura Blvd. in Woodland Hills; (818) 887-3627.