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Feel the tension in the room

The spirit and subtext of Willard Lustenader's creations work against each other to demonstrate how the real action goes on below the surface.

TAMPA - Using realism as a vehicle for emotional and psychological revelation is a risky thing for modern-day artists, inheritors of abstract expressionism, a movement that explored inner depths using surface form and color. But many artists have moved successfully from abstraction to direct observation without cliche or sentimentality, and Willard Lustenader is one of them.

Lustenader's work is the subject of a one-man show at Brad Cooper Gallery. Regulars on the gallery circuit will remember him from Cooper's fall juried show, "The Nude in the Postmodern," where his Woman with Ornament was judged best of show. Now, with about two dozen paintings and studies on view, we can see the full range of his talent and preoccupations.

Part of the dynamic Lustenader sets up in his landscapes, nudes and still lifes is the tension between the cerebral, contemplative spirit of his composition and the visceral punch of its emotional and sexual subtext. It's like Victor Hugo said, "There is nothing more interesting than a wall behind which something is happening."

Whether he's painting a woman's naked torso, tensely seated beside a single dangling Christmas ornament, or a flattened paper doll splayed on a table, Lustenader infuses people and objects with fragility and innuendo. In the beauty of his flesh tones and renderings of gourds, in the delicate paper cutouts poised on gleaming wood surfaces, is the implicit assumption of vulnerability, that flesh bruises and objects scatter or decay, that relationships spatial and emotional can change, even within the artificial confines of canvas and frame.

In several paintings, Lustenader blurs the line between landscape and still life. Compass is an interior scene in which one painting leans agains a slender mantle, partially obscuring another propped on top of the rail. To the right, a small glass holds a taper, leaning precipitously toward both paintings. The two taken together create multiple windows to places beyond the wall and comprise almost a whole landscape, one showing us sky and clouds, the other trees and land. But it's only an illusion of completeness, just as the two paintings within a painting are visual illusions.

Brightly colored paper houses sitting on a table, like the colorful paper cutouts of Matisse rendered in three dimensions, seem like a simple, straightforward exercise in spatial combinations. Then we notice a curving gourd rising up behind them, a home-wrecking, phalliclike serpent on the verge of dispersing the careful arrangement, suggesting that Adam and Eve are about to be expelled from suburbia.

The ambiguity and anxiety lurking in these works ramps up considerably in Other Voices, Other Rooms. A nude woman gazes away from us and the richly detailed interior we see over her shoulder, a sliver visible through the opening of a bare white wall. Another person, fully clothed, sits in an easy chair under a window that opens to a lush landscape, and she, too, gazes at something out of our view but in the opposite direction. It's full of disparate elements, the bareness of the woman's body, the simple chair and little paper dress tacked to the white wall in the foreground compared with the clashing, intersecting planes and business in the distance. It raises all kinds of questions. Yet it's amazingly serene.

Lustenader's paintings are a little bit of a guilty pleasure, like the voyeurism of 19th century French genre paintings, but they also owe a lot to Vermeer's interiors that reveal private moments without self-consciousness. In his treatment of flesh tones, he's thoroughly contemporary.

Cooper's gallery is a bit off the beaten path, tucked behind a storefront in Ybor City, but like Lustenader's paintings, there's a lot happening within those walls, and it's worth a visit.

"Willard Lustenader: Paintings and Drawings" is at Brad Cooper Gallery, 1712 W Seventh Ave., Ybor City, through May 18. Gallery hours are 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Wednesday through Saturday and by appointment. (813) 248-6098.