The art-space continuum:
Mary Warner leaves sensual realism behind for flight of fancy
By Victoria Dalkey -- Bee Art Correspondent

Mary Warner's recent flower paintings at Jay Jay gallery venture into new territory, departing the sensual hyper-realism for which she has become known for the realm of imagination and fantasy. Easily her most eccentric images to date, these clusters of tubular, gelatinous blossoms are perversely unappealing, violating our conception of flowers as the epitome of beauty.

In the centerpiece of the show, a large painting titled "Blue," Warner takes us into an alien world in which the curling, protruding, unearthly blue blossoms of a protealike flower project into the viewer's space. As has been the case in recent years, Warner has painted the blossom in acrylic on black velvet, a sexy material that echoes the role of flowers as the sex organ of plants. The wide-angle convex form of the painting is a little like Cinemascope, surrounding you with the image whose rubbery, fluorescent forms might belong to an exotic undersea creature.

But as you ponder it, it seems less and less connected to the natural world. Its plastic, artificial forms seem plucked from an animated cartoon - a Disney version of florescence. Yet this is not a PG-rated flower. Its exploding tendrils suggest the gigantic animated spermatozoa of an alien creature mindlessly zooming out to propagate himself in outer space.

Warner's palette and approach to color has shifted in this work and another piece in which projecting forms with bulbous tips are painted a kind of icky acid green that makes you think of slime creatures. Also divorced from the subtle tonal range of her earlier flower subjects is "Robo-Gro," a pastel and gouache of bubblelike flowers in reds, pinks and salmons that look like kitschy plastic souvenirs.

"That Dance," a wide-screen, in-your-face painting of bearded iris, hearkens back to Warner's earlier work. Its delicate, breathtaking gradations of color and soft, velvety textures convey the exotic beauty and hot-house sensuality of the frilly blossoms. "Proteus," an oddly dark and lightless painting of a dense cluster of tightly wound and gently unfurling stamens of a protea, acts as kind of bridge between "That Dance" and "Blue." The convex painting explodes into the viewer's space, aggressively asserting a strange sexuality. The title, which refers to a shape-shifting Greek sea god, may be a reference to the way Warner's protea take on the quality of alien or underwater creatures as they are enlarged and divorced from their context.

A series of pastel studies of flowers - some bubblelike, others ghostly - are quieter works that demonstrate Warner's strong drawing skills. She works with a wide range of tones in these appealing pieces, giving us clusters of blossoms that range from pale, translucent greens and grays to deep blues and blacks. They draw on the tradition of botanical renderings but transcend them by asserting the intrinsic strangeness of Warner's visionary flowers.

In some of these new works, Warner takes leaps into uncharted territory, leaving the realm of traditional still-life paintings of flowers behind. Ignoring conventional ideas of flower paintings as decoration or as symbols of the evanescence of life, they have an artificiality that is both intriguing and off-putting. Whether you like them or not, they are worth looking at and thinking about.

Etchings by Seiko Tachibana and Kazuko Watanabe, printed at the KALA Art Institute in Berkeley, are on view in Jay Jay's back gallery space. Founded in 1974 by Archana Horsting and Yuzo Nakana, who met as students at Stanley Hayter's famed Atelier 17 in Paris, KALA is a multicultural printmaking workshop for Bay Area and international artists, especially those from Pacific Rim cultures. Tachibana and Watanabe have made prints at KALA for many years.

Several of Tachibana's elegant intaglio etchings on Japanese papers present enigmatic, minimal black forms intruding from the edges of her compositions. The mysterious inky shapes are placed against luscious papers whose soft, fleshy surfaces are broken by streaks and drops that suggest rain falling. Some, stretched over rectangular wooden blocks stacked in a long vertical column, form a haunting abstract narrative that includes cloudlike forms placed against subtly colored and almost subliminally marked papers.

Watanabe's multicolored etchings with photogravure combine geometric forms with amorphous photographic imagery into collagelike abstractions that remind one at times of Robert Rauschenberg's silkscreen prints, at others of the whimsical drawings of Paul Klee. Placing ovals, spirals and linear forms against sheer diaphanous rectangles of warm, luminous oranges and reds, she constructs playful abstract images with narrative overtones.

In some of their works, Tachibana and Watanabe focus on circular forms, which have become ubiquitous in the works of contemporary artists in recent years. What these circles, ovals, dots and blobs signify is a mystery, though they may be symbols of completeness. The reason for their prominence in the works of artists not just in California but all over the country, as seen at the recent San Francisco Art Expo, is a puzzle as well. The image must be indicative of some aspect of the contemporary art world zeitgeist, but, as did the image of howling wolves, coyotes and dogs done by Warner and others in the 1970s, they are beginning to wear thin.

Mary Warner paintings, Seiko Tachibana and Kazuko Watanabe prints
WHERE: Jay Jay, 5520 Elvas Ave.
WHEN: 11 a.m.-4 p.m. Wednesdays-Saturdays, through April 23
TICKETS: Free
INFORMATION: (916) 453-2999