The Russian Connection

“Diversity 2000” is probably the finest show to date at the VIVA Gallery, which is celebrating its first birthday this month, a milestone for a grass-roots cultural endeavor.

The current show at the Northridge space comes from a group called the California Russian Artists. What we find in this sampling of work by emigre artists living in the state are references to Russian art of historical lore and then some.

It’s a bit dizzying, looking at 36 artists without a thematic plan. Then again, the theme is the homeland, and its relation to the adopted home.

Old and new art meet on common ground in Vladimir Atanian’s clay and acrylic sculptures, as in his “Exit from Renaissance,” with collage images from art history affixed to the abstract forms.

Ten-year-old Ukrainian Alina Eydel’s paintings are whimsical and light-hearted, with cats involved, but they also exert a charm we might be tempted to relate to beloved Russian Marc Chagall.

Yevgenia Nayberg’s “Duel” also adopts a folkloric approach to image-making, with a darker expression. Peter Vegin, also a poet, shows a unique outsider’s perception in his “Sunset Boulevard at Night,” a blue-suffused nocturnal scene and hardly the garish, bustling boulevard we know and sometimes love.

Nostalgia for home seeps through the fragmented Cubist shapes of Ernest Galperin’s “Memories of Odessa.” Marina Gasparian’s “Sitting Model” is a witty mixture of paint and collage, skin-care ads and wrapping paper, making sly reference to the central nude subject.

Leonid Katsnelson’s computer-generated art, such as “Summertime,” a still life with a cell phone, manages to be at once crisp and surreal, while Ivan Shvarts shows simple, mythic images on handmade paper with touches of gold leaf. Abstraction, virtually an invention of such early 20th century Russian artists as Kandinsky, is surprisingly rare here, but it rears its head in the drips and splashes of Gagik Fagradyan’s cosmic painting “Eternity.”

Arina Sloutek shows fanciful, ornate paintings that are almost Bosch-ian in their depiction of a world that seems, vaguely, to be dismantling itself. Gia Chikvaidze also shows hyper-detailed work, at once exacting and sardonic in “The Expatriation from the Garden of Eden.” Reach a bit, that image might be interpreted as a metaphor for the strain of life after Bolshevism and the desire for Russian flight to places like California.

But that’s probably just the sociocultural filter at work, reading too much reality into the domain of creative expression. And pure creative energy, well-trained, is the real story here.

BE THERE

“Diversity 2000,” through Jan. 29 at VIVA Gallery, 8516 Reseda Blvd., Northridge. Hours: Wednesday-Friday, 11:20 a.m.-4 p.m.; Saturday, noon-4 p.m. (818) 576-0775.