Worth the Extra Steps

There’s a new art gallery in town, and it’s off the beaten path in more ways than one. Visitors to Saturday’s Ventura Artwalk will have to venture a few blocks from the main downtown corridor to find it, but it’s worth the extra mile.

The Atget Photo Gallery has opened in the Main Street space once occupied by the Frame Seller. This is good news for aficionados of fine-art photography, still an offbeat stepchild of the art world.

Taking its name from famed French photographer Eugene Atget, the gallery was opened late last month by owner Monika Binkley, who has been putting finishing touches on the redesigned interior, making for a warm, inviting venue.

Along with the recent reopening of the John Nichols Gallery in Santa Paula--an off-and-on mainstay of the local fine-art photography scene during the last several years--the opening of Atget marks what is potentially a new era in photographic energy in Ventura County.

The opening show offers a suitably diverse menu of aesthetics. Best of all, Polish photographer Hanna Zbroniec fascinates with the kind of metaphor-fortified imagination we often see in the work of Eastern Europeans, who r are naturally inclined or forced by repressive circumstances to work under cover of abstraction.

The series entitled “Ptasznik” (birdhouse) details vignettes from some dimension between waking and dreaming worlds. Crude clay figures are suspended on lines, either for show--as if they are surreal trapeze artists--or hanging on for dear life, dangling over the abyss. The tension enhances the abstract drama.

William Hendricks, seasoned Ventura-based photographer who teaches at Ventura College, shows two of his dramatic, nearly life-size portraits from his sojourns to Cuba. Using the format of dye-based ink prints with a subtle sepia tint, Hendricks poses subjects in front of a white backdrop, managing to capture essential character traits.

“Gladyz Ferrer--59 years” is a roundish woman puffing luxuriantly on a cigar, that symbol of Cuban life, while “Jorge Fiallo--73 years” is a proud, lean man in baggy pants and a baseball jersey reading “Cuba.”

The back half of the gallery exhibits a series of stills from a documentary in progress on “The Whale Shark Hunters of the Philippines,” by Erin N. Calmes, an Oregonian relocating to Ventura. This straighter, less photograph-oriented reportorial work seems a little out of place, but it all adds up to a well-rounded sampler show.

* “The Opening Show,” through Aug. 30 at Atget Photo Gallery, 1484 E. Main St., Ventura. Hours: Tuesday-Saturday, 1-6 p.m.; 652-1122.

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SKY POWER: Charlotte Olonoff’s impressive show at the Buenaventura Gallery, “Tierra Arriba,” looks skyward for its inspiration, and finds plenty. She’s especially fond of the turbulent splendor of cloud formations at sunset, that brief, mercurial time of day when the celestial color palette goes over the top.

In paintings such as “Arizona Sunset” and “Down on the Delta,” the reds, blues and other shades interact unpredictably. Such formidable cloud-scapes can be a field day for realists who like to bump into the abstraction of the most natural sort.

“Ventura” is a diptych in which the sky spreads across two canvases, suggesting the sense of continuum overhead rather than reducing the view to a contained, linear scene.

The painting “Tierra Arriba” depicts a wavy sweep of intense reds and violets that bring to mind a California variation on the art of 19th century British painter J.W. Turner, whose pictures of unruly skies drew on nature to hint at supernatural and/or abstract forces.

Olonoff alludes to locales in her titles, such as “Lompoc Sky” and “Oceano Beach,” but these may be reference points for her own records rather than meaningful signposts for the viewer. The real show overhead, so strikingly captured by the painter, transcends the particulars of geography or city limits.

* “Tierra Arriba,” oil paintings by Charlotte Olonoff, through Friday at Buenaventura Gallery, 700 E. Santa Clara St., Ventura. Hours: 11 a.m.-4 p.m., Tuesday-Saturday; 648-1235.