She's on the job
By Victoria Dalkey, Bee Art Correspondent

… Painter Peter Stegall's mini-retrospective in the center's back gallery ranges from jewellike, obsessively patterned watercolors from the 1970s that remind you of Persian miniatures to recent small paintings in high-gloss enamel that continue his explorations of symmetry, pattern and color relationships.

Following Henri Matisse's dictum that a work of art should be as comfortable as an armchair, Stegall strives to achieve a pure aesthetic in which, he says, "the key words are beauty, harmony, order and balance." In doing so, he creates radiant works that vibrate with optical energy that emerges from the tension between positive and negative space and the juxtaposition of close-valued colors.
Using curvilinear shapes and intense colors, Stegall places, for example, a subtle gray-green next to a lush magenta whose after-images change the original hues after you have stared at them for a while. The magenta's yellow complement appears on the gray-green shape casting a yellow-green light.

In a larger work from the 1980s, geometric shapes - triangles, diamonds and polyhedrons in aggressive hues of red, yellow and blue - set up disorienting but fascinating spatial anomalies and optical illusions. It forms a bridge to three-dimensional works from the '80s to the present that Stegall has never shown before.

Made of balsa wood and cardboard painted with enamels, the small constructions are complex and playful works that range from a slightly sinister piece in which a black snake is entrapped in a red-and-green cage to a cheerful constructivist composition in warm tones of red, yellow and orange. In some of the works, cast shadows add yet another layer of intricacy to brightly colored, cagelike constructions that entrap space in open-work lattices.

A droll sense of humor seems to be at work in some of the artist's intricate constructions. A deceptively simple wall piece with a black circle that suggests a clown's nose, for example, sticks out of a head made of a delicate violet grid that lies over a pale-yellow form with undulant edges. Whimsy, too, pervades another work in which a tiny red camel is set in a shadow box of the same red that makes it appear only when you draw near to the work.

Stegall's work is presented at CCAS courtesy of Jay Jay gallery, where a strong show of metal sculptures by Roger Berry and works on paper by Susan Keizer are up through Feb. 25. Celebrating modernism, Berry's pure linear sculptures and Keizer's gutsy, expressionistic drawings and monoprints take different approaches to abstraction.

Berry is best known for his large public works, among them "Waterfall," at the parking garage across from Cesar Chavez Plaza at 10th and I streets, and "Phoebus," at the UC Davis Medical Center on Stockton Boulevard. The Jay Jay show gives us a look at more-personal works made of interlocking spheres of conic bands bent into dancing, lyrical forms with figurative connotations.
The drawings in space, formed from one continuous line that moves in looping, veering arcs, must be seen to be fully appreciated. Only when seen in the round can you perceive the forms described by the conic bands and sense the simultaneous freedom and control Berry has brought to the making of them.

Feats of technical wizardry, the pieces on view range from a small maquette for "Clover," a monumental 18-by-20-foot site-specific work in Yolo County, to "Mozart," a towering sculpture that rises up in a series of complex, musical forms. "Diva" swells up like a Wagnerian soprano. "Tempest," a silicon bronze piece with a cool blue patina, suggests a swirling breeze. "Repose" describes a reclining figure curled in on itself.

Keizer's large, multilayered drawings in ink, acrylic and pastel are full of swirling, energetic markings that at times suggest the female anatomy - breasts and hips - rising from a maelstrom of dark, powerful forces. In contrast to her earlier works, largely done in black and white, the new pieces are injected with strong doses of color.

Intense hues - reds, blues, greens and yellows - play across the surface of "Cuatro II," emerging from a welter of dark markings, slashing and arcing across the paper in a whirlwind. Keizer draws from the shoulder with bold, vigorous, visceral strokes that let you feel the movement of her body. A small woman, she projects a large persona in these dynamic evocations of emotional and physical states.
A series of smaller monotypes combine recognizable subject matter - ladders, bocce balls, a man's profile - with abstract passages. Lighter in spirit than her large-scale drawings, these painterly works win us over with their delicate, whimsical imagery and intimate scale.

While you're at Jay Jay, be sure to ask to see its annex across the parking lot. It's filled with stunning large works by a number of prominent Northern California artists, among them Joan Moment, David Wetzl, Judith Foosaner and Michael Stevens.