Valley Faces

Local color, with a human interest emphasis, has a field day in the work of Jodi Bonassi, now at the Orlando Gallery in Sherman Oaks. With her oil and acrylic portraits, the artist depicts “Valley People,” a willfully diverse gathering of subjects in their homes and other settings--all in the microcosm we call the San Fernando Valley.

As a portraitist, Bonassi’s tendency is to depict her subjects with a kind of Silly Putty realism, exaggerating anatomical features--especially hands. Sometimes, she also stuffs an abundance of visual activity into a composition to represent a suitably claustrophobic environment, or perhaps to capture a dense identity.

Not knowing the personalities at hand, one is left to the painter’s devices in depicting characters, and caricatures. “Mrs. Miller” is a teacher, buried in a book while two students draw presumably irrelevant pictures on the chalkboard. The homebound “Ellen” is a figure in stockinged feet, enveloped by a couch, conveying repose and fatigue.

Meanwhile, “Pulling Weeds” exerts a strange, almost Botero-like charm: A hefty woman in an ample, orange shirt cradles a cell phone and consumes the picture plane. She is sitting idly in the frontyard of a suburban row house, but, true to the title, she holds a lone weed, like a little prize and evidence of domestic upkeep.

From a different perspective entirely, Constantine Samuel Gonzalez shows painting on black velvet in the other half of the gallery.

Generally speaking, his purview is more cosmic, with little of the kitschy connections we might reflexively expect from the vernacular of paintings on black velvet.

Gonzalez, a young artist from Agoura Hills, looks skyward for inspiration, as with the large “Clouds and Stars,” fusing clouds and star imagery with faux constellations and suggestions of angels. In “Waiting,” celestial imagery hovers around the devil himself, horns and all, and “Mother Angel” presents a semispiritual figure, half flesh, half spirit-world inhabitant.

With these paintings, Gonzalez dances along an artistic ledge where new age vagaries threaten to undermine his good, exploratory intentions. But he has enough objectivity and imagination, not to mention the peculiar lure of black velvet, to keep the art vital.

BE THERE

Jodi Bonassi and Constantine Samuel Gonzalez, through Jan. 30 at Orlando Gallery, 14553 Ventura Blvd. in Sherman Oaks. Gallery hours: 10 a.m.-4 p.m., Tuesday-Saturday; (818) 789-6012.