ART REVIEW : Surreal Sleepwalking at Armory Center

It’s hot these days. The gallery at Pasadena’s Armory Center for the Arts has no air conditioning. Don’t let that stop you from going to its current exhibition, “Drawings as Poems.” The temperature only heightens the show’s sense of gentle surreal sleepwalking.

Organized by guest curator Josine Ianco-Starrels, the spread includes roughly five works each by eight California artists. Only two of them, Raymond Saunders and Marvin Harden, are particularly well known. Even they behave as if they don’t much care.

That seems to be the point. This is a show about artists determined to do their thing their own way despite eddies in fashion or snappy new trends. They take what they need from various contemporary trends and graft it onto classic forms of drawing. Some works look like something done in a studio barn in Agoura, others like the mysterious expression of a longtime resident in a foreign city--somebody who never found friends or learned the language and so just invented a personal, secret one.

Mari Omori’s dense ink and graphite works are a lot like that. In “Black Rain, Black Pain,” vertical, flag-like stripes are nearly obliterated under a shiny midnight-dark wash. Up in one corner is a grid of white lines. Each small square contains an Oriental calligraphic character. It adds up to a rumination on alienation, social coercion and systems of thought.

Rolando Castellon literally takes pages from books and overlays the print with a rich palimpsest of enigmatic specters and rows of tiny pressed flowers and twigs. Perhaps they intend to release the imagination and intimations of nature that books capture.

A good bit of anxiety gnaws the edges of this work. Some of it borders on the monstrous. Julia Couzens makes oversize images of one or two looming shapes that look like boulders becoming flesh. There are unmistakable signs of pubic hair. Gendron Jensen also works big. His compositions look like enlarged renderings of spinal bones arranged symmetrically like Rorschach blots.

You can read a lot into both artists--lingering horror of atomic mutation or sexual fears. But none of the demons released here are frightening. The artists keep them at bay through a calm, ritualistic act of drawing. Time is slowed to a standstill and the universal beast is tamed with delicate strength.

A quiet place is created within. The world without becomes peaceful. Saunders incorporates the abstract marks and pop-icon hearts of his painting but surprises us with figures rendered in single wire-thin lines. He is amused and sympathetic at the sight of a fisherwoman trudging home with her catch.

Harden’s tiny horses and cows rest in their metaphysical fields and inspire him to titles such as “A Fine and Private Place.” Minoru Ohira begins with the shapes of grasses and tide-pool animals and--by changing them to abstract patterns--shows their movement.

A compulsion to withdraw informs much of the work. Adam Ross’ tiny befogged landscapes have specific titles such as “La Loma Bridge, Pasadena” or “Interchange of the Century Freeway” but they are so dreamily rendered we wonder if the places really exist.

Is the world really there for the poet? Christine Taylor Patten says it is but she has fears for it. There is a composition where forms like fallen bars become multiple horizon lines as if the whole planet is coming apart. It’s called, “And How Will the Music Help Now?”

Armory Center for the Arts, 145 N. Raymond Ave . Pasadena, (818) 792-5101 , through Sept. 6. Closed Mondays .