Playful Obsessions

Two artists now at the Orlando Gallery veer off in separate directions but somehow belong together as examples of artists pursuing private obsessions to different ends. Both deal with the female form as a subject of awe and a vehicle for metamorphosis.

David Hidalgo works in a friendly enough subdivision of neo-surrealism where reality has been thrown slightly askew. In “Forces of Nature,” a woman who is nude from the waist up melts into the bottom half of a gown, a quirky variation on the mermaid myth.

These are playful paintings with nothing too serious or decadent to spoil the party.

In “Task at Hand,” there is only a thin veneer of surreal irrationality in an image that includes a sleeping woman, a goldfish in a plastic bag that awaits delivery into its bowl, and an unfinished jigsaw puzzle of sea life.

It’s a puzzle in itself, possibly something out of a dream of the very woman at the composition’s center.

Hidalgo tosses a curve ball into the picture with “On a Clear Day.” He presents an almost straight portrait of a woman with the East River and New York City in the background. But it’s a big “almost.” Hidalgo has bowed directly to a signature trick of the popular Belgian surrealist Rene Magritte by turning the woman’s face into a clouded sky.

Surrealism’s obsession with things sexual, if hidden in sublimated imagery and obtuse metaphors, crops up in “Beyond the Veil,” in which a woman clings to a rope. She is warily eyeing a huge flower, the protruding pistil of which is hard to view as anything but a phallic symbol.

Continuing in the vein of phallic imagery, Roger Doucette has pieced together a strangely intriguing series of pictures involving surfing, sex, romantic love and what he calls “the mythos of Jesus Christ.”

Using the delicate, rapid medium of watercolor on fine quality paper, Doucette has concocted pictures that bear some of the classic markings of surfer art, with dazed iconography and anatomical forms overlapping fluidly.

It is the kind of stuff surfer dudes sketch in classrooms while daydreaming of waves, but with a fairly refined artistry attached to its conception.

Religion fits into his aesthetic a bit uncomfortably, such as in the slapdash reference to St. Sebastian in “Target Practice.” In “Crucified by the Sound of Your Name,” Doucette equates and interweaves romantic love and martyrdom.

In general, the art depicts ecstasy, suffering or otherwise extreme states of being. Figures are often descending in a free fall, their hair windblown vertically, indicating impending doom or something so cliched and essential as falling in love. The art seems to address an alternately sinking and soaring feeling.

BE THERE

David Hidalgo, “New and Improved,” and Roger Doucette, “From Ocean Park to Belmont Shores,” through Sept. 29 at Orlando Gallery, 18376 Ventura Blvd., Tarzana. Gallery hours: Tuesday-Saturday 10 a.m.-4 p.m. (818) 705-5368.