"Figuring Eros"

William Zimmer

March 25, 1990

Having expanded to 8,000 feet of exhibition space, the Newhouse Center for Contemporary Art at Snug Harbor on Staten Island can give the 10 painters in ''Figuring Eros'' the equivalent of a one-person show each. As the title implies, the show has to do with love and lust, but it is light in the contemporary sense of the term. As with light beer, it is easy to swallow. Libidinous qualities are up front at times; at other times they are highly nuanced.

Olivia Georgia, the curator and also the new director of the Newhouse Center, said it was not her original intent to mount a show with an erotic theme. But she had been making a lot of studio visits in New York and Washington, from where she came, and noticed that love and sex were a common thread running through works of the painters she liked best. This is also a show with urgency. Any Federal anti-obscenity statute that could conceivably be framed would prohibit a lot of these paintings and drawings.

But one sees a lot less politics than cartoons here. In the main corridor there is that old comic book favorite Richie Rich in a straitjacket, and across the way his pal Little Dot is provocatively bound and gagged. Both are the vision of Nicole Eisenman, who also dares pose topless the squaw who adorns packages of Land O Lakes butter. Ms. Eisenman favors strapping figures, so even when she's corny and obvious, we pay attention.

Craig Hackman, a Staten Islander, contributes narratives that contain in-jokes like Amazing Snoopy, a local piano-playing canine. But his best joke is a broad art historic one: the European painter Balthus is famous for his paintings of adolescent girls. In Balthus's signature grainy style, Mr. Hackman renders a fully grown-up pin-up girl.

A snappy contrast is between the frenzy of Tim Kirk and the gauzy dreaminess of Jan Posvar, a recent emigre from Staten Island to Manhattan. Mr. Kirk's paintings are well orchestrated, convoluted and explicit bad dreams, while Mr. Posvar challenges you to believe that the shadow of a flying airplane across a house in a wide field is genuinely erotic. In ''Girl Group,'' a portrait of a singing trio in shimmery dresses, Mr. Posvar says his aim was to create a three-headed monster. It's the flip side of sexy.

We are informed that Christine Perri is a professor of English, but she has an understanding and absorption of the Chicago style. Her figures seem to have bright neon crawling under their skin. But a more complete creation of a new species is accomplished by Robert Franca, who puts on a sustained performance here with 22 works - paintings and gouaches. His humanoids are part organic and part geometric and often look as if the originals that he lulls us into thinking he used as models were made of clay.

Robin Locke Monda has biomorphic shapes stand in for humans, and she has a colorful whiz-bang style into which cartoon staples like bulbous Micky Mouse shoes sometimes intrude. Ellen Burchenal is less wildly organic or biomorphic, for she steadily uses the hourglass shape.

The two artists one must spend the most time with are Kenny Cole and Steven Harvey. Both are obsessive. Mr. Cole paints and draws on both sides of his supports, and sometimes in one work several variously shaped panels nest into each other. His works are more than this device, however; the imagery flows tantalizingly between realism and abstraction.

Mr. Harvey is the artist here with a solid X across his chest. But you have to get up close and squint to make out the goings on. Several works are blue on blue in homage to blue movies. Yet we also appreciate that Mr. Harvey renders what have historically been private acts in a way that mimics having the lights out.

Snug Harbor is at 1000 Richmond Terrace, Staten Island, and the Newhouse gallery is open Wednesday through Sunday from noon to 5 P.M. The show runs through April 15.