Paradox in Progress

Painter Michael Dvortcsak has lived and worked in Ojai for several years and qualifies as one of the county’s fine art luminaries. His work, though, tends to be disseminated far beyond county lines, with only rare sightings in the area.

Now his art is in plain view at Ventura City Hall. And concurrent with the unveiling of two murals in the entrance to City Hall, Oxnard’s Carnegie Art Museum is presenting an exhibition of his recent paintings, a long-awaited follow-up to his first show there 3 1/2 years ago.

Dvortcsak, whose paintings tend to deal with the convergence of mythology and historical models with a contemporary sensibility, might not seem a likely candidate for the civically sensitive task of painting murals in a government building. But his twin pieces at City Hall defy such second-guessing.

The modestly scaled murals, facing each other across the entryway of City Hall, make for a composite civic and geographical portrait. On cursory glance, the artist is rising to the standard challenge of portraying Ventura’s people and sense of place. Beneath the surface, he is saying more.

One mural is an aerial view of Ventura, dramatically brushed by an epic wash of early morning sunlight. Here, Dvortcsak’s signature way with light is cleverly woven into the scene. In an artistic statement at the Carnegie, Dvortcsak says, “Light is the most fundamental subject of my painting.”

In the other mural, his particular touch in painting water, stones and vegetation is subtly folded into the scene, and his literal signature is coyly branded onto an orange crate in the image. In this cross-section of Ventura residents, past and present, history, gender, social standing and race are equitably accounted for, with a friar, farm workers, a Native American and a modern Southern California family in the lot.

This image makes for a logical extension of the aesthetic seen in the Ventura Post Office, in Gordon Grant’s WPA-era murals. The city should be commended for bringing an artist of Dvortcsak’s distinction into the public art loop.

The Carnegie show, “Painting Nouns (Person, Place or Thing),” is no doubt one of the events of the regional art season, an enlightening glimpse at the shifts and growth in Dvortcsak’s recent work. As things have changed, things have remained the same for him, it seems, with his long-standing intrigue with the effects of light and materiality still in evidence.

But he also is moving, in a sideways direction, away from the abstraction of earlier work, in which natural elements were isolated and stylized to the point of severing ties to the concrete world. Here, we find an old-fashioned portrait of a young woman, “Miss Pendergrast,” painted in 2000. The subject, bunched up in a chair, has light bathing her right side and her white dress in an otherwise blackened space.

The show also features a new series of enigmatic paintings, such as “Moon and Stone,” which might be called loaded seascapes. Large stones, bathed in celestial light and metaphorically ripe, sit amid seas under brooding skies.

Ancient cultural references and echoes of the Old Masters filter freely into his work. In “Ave Maria,” an odd grouping of classical figures is gathered in uneven scale as if in a self-conscious gesture of homage to art history. Upstairs, there are several examples of his ravishing yet mystical paintings of light-embraced vessels and sarcophagi, which are as much about light, mass and the mysteries of antiquity as they are about archeology.

The old world connection rings truest in “Portrait of the Artist Painting a Portrait of the Artist,” an uncharacteristically canny piece of work for Dvortcsak.

Art-within-art forces are deployed in an image of the artist lounging in the living room foreground and the artist as the detached observer working in his studio in the background.

In another direction entirely is “Imaginary Landscape No. 54.” An arid landscape appears fabricated in strange proportions and distorted perspective, yet linked to terra firma.

Like most of Dvortcsak’s paintings, this one has an ambivalent relationship to the world as we know it. The challenge is a paradox-in-progress. He is an artist seeking to illuminate the surface of things while conjuring up an alternate reality from within and using the medium of painting to do his bidding.

DETAILS

“Painting Nouns (Person, Place or Thing),” by Michael Dvortcsak, through Jan. 28 at the Carnegie Art Museum, 424 South C St. in Oxnard. Hours: Thurs-Sat. 10 a.m.-5 p.m. and Sun., 1-5 p.m.; 385-8157.

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