A Show for the Season

Summertime and the living tends to be easier in the art world. Artistic visions and curatorial ambitions relax. Art watchers saunter. Group shows pop up in the interim between more focused, high profile exhibitions.

Under these circumstances, it’s no surprise to run into the show at the Orlando Gallery with the cheeky title “Hot Art--Hot Artists.” When summer comes to the San Fernando Valley, hot is a natural buzzword.

But the casual, thrown-together nature of the work is deceptive. This gallery has been around long enough that a show like this can be viewed as a progress report. We even find a bit of self-portraiture.

Hanging over the doorway is a vintage mixed-media piece by one of the gallery’s founders, the late Phil Orlando, who slathered paint with a flippant, Pop Art approach over a reproduction of a painting of a woman and inserted a tiny photograph of himself in one eye.

In the whimsical wood sculptures by David Elder, summer irony rears its head in form and content. Sculptor David Stickley, by contrast, works up gangly, quasi-junk sculptures with thickets of material glopped over with a coating, suggesting mock archeological artifacts.

The ranks of “emerging artists” new to the Orlando include Lavelle Mason, whose painting combines a symmetrical and neatly cleaved image of watermelon and the loaded word TEMPT in block letters. Robert Tiffe shows a big, garrulous abstraction realized with a broad brush; and Russian emigre Anna Hit shows an intriguing fresco-like image of half-rendered figures adrift in the cosmos.

David Whalen’s dry-witted painting of an interior stirs various knickknacks, kitschy objects and allusions to classical art in a freewheeling stew of references.

Anyu Wang is another fresh voice whose impressive photo-realist painting depicts a Chinese street scene with mystery in the margins. He paints with a detailed veracity, emulating the photographic nature of an out-of-focus image of a bicyclist in the foreground. Urban bustle is the gist of the piece, but serenity lurks in the form of a temple rising in the background.

The “Hot” show includes work by established artists. Jenik Cook shows one of her festive post-Picasso-esque convergences of color and Cubist forms. In unexpected turns, Gloria Moses, whose flowing floral paintings were seen here recently, shows her goofy, semi-comical ceramic sculptures of pets. Frequent Orlando artist Rene Amitai blends abstraction with tradition in an Old World landscape.

The living may be easy, but there’s good reason to swing by the gallery this month. Another appeal: The place is air-conditioned.

BE THERE

“Hot Art--Hot Artists,” through July 28 at the Orlando Gallery, 18376 Ventura Blvd., Tarzana. Hours: Tuesday-Saturday, 10 a.m.-4 p.m. (818) 705-5368.