Spanish Dreams

One of the most dazzling art shows to hit Ventura County this year is the rambling overview of Spanish artist Jesus Villalonga, threaded through the hallways of the Thousand Oaks Civic Arts Plaza’s Kavli Theater. This art, dense and dizzying in an engaging way, conveys a rich world, informed by both dreams and art history, of the artist’s own devising.

At the risk of cultural stereotyping, Villalonga’s work can be compared to notable Spanish artists of the last century. Though possessing a powerful sense of personal identity, his work invites parallels to surrealists Joan Miro and Salvador Dali (with whom Villalonga cavorted and whose spatial and figurative distortions he echoes), and even Picasso’s blend of folkish simplicity and intellectual sophistication.

Barcelona and the fabric of the artist’s life back home figure prominently in his art, albeit filtered through a vivid, transforming imagination, but his points of reference also take in life on this side of the Atlantic.

His travels to such exotic places as Southern California and Montreal (where this show goes next) result in site-specific inventions, including “Thousand Oaks Madonna,” a multiracial Madonna bedecked in a Thousand Oaks map.

“Los Angeles” depicts the beneficent angelic figure, clutching flowers and a book of wisdom, looked upon by humble minions and a lifeguard (future seer?) hanging his head in dejection. Hope and fear, hallmarks of life in this part of the world, hum beneath the fastidiously ornamented scene.

In “Montreal et la foret,” Villalonga freely mixes the bodies of lovers with aspects of landscape and urbanscape, in a blissful convergence. A nude woman, enmeshed in forest imagery, floats over a reclining man, grounded and woven into the city skyline.

It’s an image that typifies Villalonga’s dreamer’s view--Chagall comes to mind here--of the slippery links between humanity, environment and the mysteries of our psyches.

As a whole, the exhibition itself paints a flattering portrait of the Barcelona-based artist, whose intricately designed, yet intuitively spirited work combines references to mythology and geography, sexuality and earth motherhood. He isn’t an abstractionist, per se, but often he seems to pour his abstract instincts into the molds of familiar subjects.

“Dreamer,” for instance, is a large painting in which the identifiable elements--male and female figures, a house and landscaping--are elaborately filled in with designs that, if isolated and enlarged, could only be considered abstract.

The artistic ambition grows as you ascend through the Kavli halls. Wend your way from the works on paper on the ground floor to larger paintings on the next floor up.

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On the mezzanine level, you find the show’s apotheosis, the epic painting “Portrait Imaginaire,” which the artist has worked on for years and is flanked by several smaller variations and studies. In this scene, which looks dramatically out over the theater lobby and the view of the hills of Thousand Oaks beyond, the apparent setting is a courtly audience for a lithe, almost serpentine dancer.

But, as usual with Villalonga, the figures’ outlines become templates for the artist’s fanciful ornamentation. There is more to the story: The gallery of figures pays homage to a diverse bunch of cultural heroes, including painters Dali and Francis Bacon, writers Gunter Grass and Garcia Marquez, surreal film director Luis Bunuel (another Spanish hero), scientists, astronauts, a chef and other luminaries hand-picked by the artist.

In some real way, this painting sums up the various energies driving Villalonga’s art. It exists in a richly, weirdly textured world of its own but is washed over by a constant flow of cross-references to the culture and reality around him.

DETAILS

“Poetic Symbolism From Barcelona,” art by Jesus Villalonga, through Aug. 13 at the Thousand Oaks Civic Arts Plaza, 2100 Thousand Oaks Blvd. 449-2787.

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Flowers and Then Some: Rika Traxler’s show, upstairs at Natalie’s Fine Threads in Ventura, is a congenial house blend of paintings of flowers, figures, shells and bones. The sum effect loosely adheres to the aesthetic popularized by Georgia O’Keeffe, which emphasizes common ground between plant life, nudes and the hidden structure of skeletons.

The best paintings subvert the potential cliches of the genres in which she works. “Field of Poppies,” for example, presents a fuzzily focused close-up of orange-yellow blossoms, a dreamy field of vision.

“Spirit Vessels” sharpens its focus, detailing the flesh-like contours and cavities of seashells, and “Skull” is a study in bony elegance.

DETAILS

Rika Traxler, “A Love of Life,” through June 10 at Natalie’s Fine Threads, 596 E. Main St., in Ventura. Gallery hours: 10:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday, noon to 4 p.m. Sunday; 643-8854.

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