The Look of Love

Love, and perhaps its less innocent cousin, lust, are in the air at the Art City II Gallery. It’s time for another one of this space’s periodic forays into the domain of “erotic art.”

To some, to name it such is to qualify its intentions, to stigmatize it and send it to the place where baser instincts dwell. Eroticism is a highly subjective matter. But the work in this show--by turns raw, sensuous, cheesy, meticulous, raunchy and historical--is anything but polite and dull.

Playfulness, a redeeming quality in the erotic art zone, appears regularly. Taras Tuck’s “Cleo Waits for the Phone to Ring” is a quirky blend of ideas. In this bright-colored painting, an Egyptian-esque nude reclines, regally, on a phallic couch, with a neon “motel” sign beckoning outside her window. The reclining nude in MB Hanrahan’s relief sculpture, “Sugar,” is a disaffected male with a leaf-shaped ashtray by his groin. The proverbial fig leaf of shame meets the post-coital smoke.

Surrealism has often slithered between anatomical fixations and Freudian thinking, which defines the turf of Alan Sailer’s paintings. “Gelatinous Discomfiture” creates tension and sensual abandon with its hazy distribution of fleshy fragments, as if seen through the filter of dream logic.

Things become much more clear, and electric, in the plainly erotic works of Seco. His paintings, such as “The Black Horse,” manage to be both explicit in their presentation of carnal mechanics yet also stylized via the artist’s softly Expressionist touch.

There are plenty of sculptural takes on the subject, as well. With his fastidiously rendered, observant-verging-on-leering sculptures, Edmond E. Shumpert looks unblinkingly at figures that owe as much to Bob Guccione as to Aphrodite. The striking, almost life-size figure “Venus,” for example, exists in a disarming realm halfway between classicism and pulpy pinup kitsch.

Other works find a good use for sublimation, however interested they are in matters of the libido. Frank Lauran’s “Willendorf Venus in Motion” reduces its female trunk to a quasi-Cubist assembly of bulbous forms. Joanne Duby’s “California Succulent” hints at the common theme of linking plant life to female genital forms. And “Plug-In Ecstasy,” by John V. Storejev, is a crudely fashioned assemblage in which a female torso opens to reveal a tangle of circuitry and a small TV screen.

More than any other piece in the show, Storejev’s work touches on the evolution of lust in the public sphere. We are in an age when the commercialization of eroticism has reached a new peak of confusion. The erotic beds down with the neurotic. Perhaps the presentation of erotic art in the controlled setting of a gallery context isn’t such a bad idea, whatever its checkered reputation.

DETAILS

“Beaus and Eros,” through March 12 at Art City II, 31 Peking St., in Ventura. Hours: Wednesday through Sunday, 10 a.m.-5 p.m.; 648-1690.

Josef Woodard, who writes about art and music, can be reached by e-mail at joeinfo@aol.com.