Apparatus Gallery Features The Works Of Seven Local Innovators. By Margaret Regan APPARATUS GALLERY HAS been plugging away for more than a year now, showing paintings and photographs along with quirky handmade crafts in a renovated building down in the Lost Barrio on South Park, a district better known for folk art and furnishings than for fine art. Right now, tucked among the gallery's hand-painted saws ("Idle Hands" is a charming painted hell-on-a-hand saw, complete with devil and flames, by a team called Boss/Brown), metallic knickknacks and glass tables, there's a show of 21 paintings by seven lesser-known Tucson artists. Put together by owner-operator Sharon Holnback, a photographer, the exhibition is organized around no particular theme. But it adds up to a freewheeling survey of the divergent practices in local painting. There's pleasant, loose abstraction (William Wheelan) and funky, urban symbolism (Kelly Morris), pattern painting (Simon Donovan) and landscape (Sarah Kucerova), serious metaphysics (Jo Andersen) and lurid op-art colorations (Gene Hall). Lynn O'Brien contributes the most emotionally intense work. Her small, carefully worked acrylics on canvas, collaged with papers that add texture to the surface, probe the mysteries of fertility, and, more to the point, infertility. Mixing up a classical painting style with hallucinogenic visions of the interior of the body, these pictures are filled with claustrophobic thickets of veins and fleshy tubes. Meticulously painted in blood maroon and bruise brown, the body parts form an impenetrable jungle trapping various objects in their interior. In "Brooding," a tiny wooden model of a woman (the kind found in academic art classes) sits forlornly on a chicken egg, her dutifully marked-up menstrual calendars floating around her. The egg meets a less solicitous fate in the other two paintings. A carpenter's C-clamp gingerly holds onto it in "Fragile: Handle with Care #1," while in "Fragile: Handle with Care #2" a drill ends all baby hopes, smashing eggs one after another, assembly-line style. Somewhat reminiscent of the interior body visions of the better-known Pamela Marks, who opens a show this week at Davis-Dominguez Gallery, O'Brien's troubling pictures use paint to investigate the body's betrayals. Her polar opposite is William Wheelan, whose light, lyrical abstractions hang side by side with O'Brien's dark, tightly controlled work. Wheelan has diluted his acrylic paints so much that they seem almost to have been spooned onto the canvas, pouring over each other in layers transparent enough to allow the colors underneath to seep through. Set against pale backgrounds of beige or off-white, the angular shapes in the foreground are painted in euphonious shades of green and gray, shot up with red in "Moanbac," cerulean and lime in "Wing." Like most abstractions, Wheelan's angular, geometric shapes seem to suggest some real-life counterparts (buildings? fields? suitcases?), but we can't be sure what they are. Their identity lies elusively just beyond grasp, like words we swear are just on the tip of the tongue. Jo Andersen's big oil paintings of hands, at six or seven feet by five feet, are the largest in the show. Andersen also aims large in meaning, ambitiously trying to charge her works with a lofty spirituality. "In Your Hands" suggests environmental pursuits: its clasped hands hold a green ball, probably the earth, and float against a benevolent blue sky, complete with fluffy white clouds. In "Here and Now," the hands cradle a white ball against a backdrop of deep blue infinity. Andersen has had some fun with her paint, scratching into the blue, freeing up her brushstrokes in those clouds, but her images are too commonplace, too much like blown-up holy cards of praying hands. More interesting is "Desert Garden." Its large canvas is divided in two horizontally, the top half filled with an enlarged leafy green plant held by another big hand. The bottom half is a counterpoint to the showy fecundity of the top. It's a dry-as-dust desert painted in a barren swathe of pale brown. Scratched into this desiccated earth is an environmental warning. The text reads: "Her vision of a garden in the desert is blowing away." Simon Donovan, a painter who works at the Tucson Museum of Art and teaches in its school, is probably the best known of the artists in the show. He surfaced at Etherton Gallery last winter, showing large paintings investigating the geometric and color relationships in Native American weavings. Here he works with pattern again in a series of small paintings called "X." Each of the four little canvases has been stretched into a diamond shape, and painted in an all-over pattern of circles or stripes. Donovan's deft colors are subtle variations on greens and golds. In a surprise switch, he heads into soft-edged landscape in a fifth work. This untitled painting is a desert scene in which the sun glows goldly on the purple Catalinas, and a gray-green mining tower mars the view. It's a nicely painted little work, with an interesting palette, but the painter himself is a bit of a puzzle. Like Pirandello's characters in search of an author, Donovan is an artist who appears to be in search of a subject that will engage him. Seven Painters continues through March 15 at Apparatus, 299 S. Park Ave. Gallery hours are 10:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday. For more information call 791-3505.

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