Kaleidoscopic paintings yield mixed results in solo show

Bottom line: A variety of visual influences coalesce in kaleidoscopic paintings that range in quality and engagement.

Artist Zuzka Vaclavik's paintings feel like staring into the shape-shifting movements of a kaleidoscope. Colors and shapes repeat and realign, suggesting movement where there is none. For her solo show "Thirst" at Westside gallery Poem 88, the Athens-based artist creates a mildly hallucinogenic effect with an array of visual tools.

Beyond that earliest of objects devoted to observing beauty, the kaleidoscope, Vaclavik’s drawings conjure up a variety of other associations, from stained-glass windows and textiles, to Asian and Middle Eastern art with their exquisite geometric patterns. The artist has also cited outsider art and the surrealists, with their fascination with the subconscious, as influences. Vaclavik engages with both camps’ dedication to iconoclastic exploration.

In addition to such historical precedents, the works have a wry contemporary spirit of their own; a slightly animated, playful quality with their combination of intense tropical and neon colors and bulbous, comical shapes, spurting and spewing their way through Vaclavik’s paintings.

In the appealing watercolor “Cutting the Sun,” Vaclavik mixes a typically expansive range of colors from watery, muted pastels to rich, shrieking neons, into symmetrical patterns radiating lines, starbursts and other shapes in an explosion of energy. Works like “Cutting the Sun” that focus on such precise, graphic forms tend to offer the most visual satisfaction in a show whose persuasive abilities vary.

More amorphous, unformed pieces like “Grayed In,” in which a gooey storm cloud covers the paper’s surface, projecting wet spurts at its margins, lack the punch of Vaclavik’s explorations of random, diffuse form crystallizing into tantalizing pattern.

Even the artist's website makes a distinction between those two different directions in her work, grouping her paintings into "symmetrical" and "asymmetrical" works, torn between a world in shifting flux and one assembling and reassembling itself into a kind of order.

Pattern, repetition and suggested activity seem to fascinate Vaclavik most often, though there are occasional works with a more representational streak. A small 11.5-by-9.9-inch drawing on paper at the front of the gallery, “Unfurl,” offers up curling, sensuous images of leaves and flowers in opulent jewel tones, recalling the elaborate, nature-inspired works of art nouveau. Vaclavik’s art often suggests a kind of abstracted luxury. She employs gold and silver leaf as a frequent embellishment, a gorgeous halo to set off the more delicate miasma of activity at the center of the paintings.

Many of the works, even despite some enormous variations in their appearance, share a consistent interest in offering a central point from which all activity radiates.

In a series of 34 small mixed media paintings on panel the artist calls “Untitled (Mandala),” that idea of a core “eye” out of which the energy of the painting unfurls aligns her work with the Buddhist or Hindu idea of the mandala as the emblem of a vast, complex universe. It makes sense that a visual artist, whose livelihood is focused on contemplation of objects, would find inspiration in the mandala, which is often used in Eastern religion as a means for meditation and higher consciousness.

Though her parents are Slovakian, Vaclavik spent several years living in Cambodia, and her work with its combination of rich coloration and a transcendent, meditative quality very much suggests someone drawing from many different experiences and a blend of artistic traditions.