Human Pane

In “Windows 99” at the Orlando Gallery in Sherman Oaks, we find window frames placed over paintings of mostly female nudes, suggesting voyeurism in a graphic, sometimes over-the-top approach to the nude genre.

Although Mario Sempere paints his subjects with a realist’s appreciation of flesh tones, curves and volumes, he also touches on mythic or cultural references.

“Medea” depicts a nude woman contorted in anguish, with an image of a nursing baby in the background. Three nudes sit before a crude facsimile of an artwork in the self-explanatory “Is it a Matisse?”

In the startling “Helena,” an armless, howling woman comes to us from the model of the Jennifer Lynch film “Boxing Helena.”

As in the film, the issue of feminist alarm over the male quest for gender control bumps up against button-pushing grotesqueness. What Sempere’s paintings lack in subtlety, they gain in garishness.

Sharing the gallery space this month, but not the aesthetic, are Marla Fields’ impressive abstract works on handmade paper. She relies on intricate layers and inter-weavings of color, laid on palpable, textured surfaces.

The natural roughness of the material is later treated with buildups of paint, scratched, spindled and artfully mutilated to expressive ends. Topography and landscape orientation are hinted at.

“Lost in the Garden of Imperfections” is an especially vibrant piece, teeming with knotty, imperfect, bursts of color and visual activity, like the secret life of plants in an unmaintained garden.

Over at the new VIVA gallery in Northridge, organizers continue to contribute to the Valley’s art scene with a rambling, varied show by members of the Collage Artists of America.

Among the highlights are Lois Ramirez’s “In Other Words,” with text scrambled and rendered abstract, and Patricia Purwin’s Rorschach-like image, “1 Soul in 2 Bodies.”

References to Stuart Davis and Cubist-era Picasso bubble up in Teress Altschul’s “Ode to the Guitar,” and the design sensibility in Judi Bernberg’s “Path to Guilin” boasts an Asian delicacy.

Local color and anxiety arise in Bill Braswell’s “Fissure,” with its material surface ruptured by an actual crack, and our memory of the Northridge earthquake brought nervously to bear.

BE THERE

“Windows 99” and “Eternal Rhythms” through April 30 at Orlando Gallery, 14553 Ventura Blvd., Sherman Oaks. Tuesday-Saturday 10 a.m.-4 p.m. (818) 789-6012. “Constructs” by Collage Artists of America through April 24 at VIVA Gallery, 8516 Reseda Blvd., Northridge. Wednesday-Friday 11 a.m.-4 p.m., Saturday noon-4 p.m.