VENTURA COUNTY WEEKEND : SIGHTS : ‘Biomorphic’ Blends the Real and the Surreal

On first impression, San Francisco painter Glenn Hirsch’s work, now at Ventura College, seems innocent enough. Machine-like shapes, ambiguous biomorphic images and alien life forms interact on strange landscapes in a kind of playful mode of surrealism, or, as he says in his artist’s statement, a kind of “psychedelic art.”

But there is turbulence rumbling and a mashing-together of both imagery and media. With such dream-laden works as “Dark Carnival,” “Indignant Pirouette” and “What Really Happened at Waterloo,” he mixes oil, acrylic, watercolor and the 3-D effects of layering paper. Forms and archetypes swim across the pictures, fuzzy of focus, and a carefully rendered, unsettled feeling hovers over the art.

Hirsch’s world, as represented by these paintings, is analogous to both dream states and to cyberspace. It’s a place where things are real and yet never real, perfectly logical and yet intangible and subject to chaotic occurrences at any moment.

In the New Media gallery, prints from the college’s permanent collection make for a good companion exhibition, between Goya’s tragicomic etchings, Dali’s pre-digital “Dalivision” and Chagall’s spare fantasies.

Glenn Hirsch’s “Biomorphic Fantasies,” through Nov. 17 at Ventura College Gallery Two, 4667 Telegraph Road, Ventura; 654-6462.