SIGHTS AROUND TOWN : Nightclub Art : Brightly colored paintings full of dancers and lounge-abouts are hanging out at the raucous Club Soda.

Fine art is most often encountered in clean, quiet settings. Galleries and museums have a sanctuary atmosphere, like refuges from the frantic buzz of the everyday world.

But art, after all, is where you find it. For the present, you’ll find it at Club Soda in downtown Ventura.

With their bold paintings--on tall panels and on the walls themselves--and a series of smaller woodcuts, artists Kostas Lekakis and Cindy Bolin have dramatically altered the dance club’s decor for anyone who cares to notice.

What’s this? Art in a nightclub--and one that caters to base dance instincts instead of an arty veneer? Why not? In the ‘20s, expressionists depicted the decadence of Germany between the wars. Those artists’ scenes of debauchery, though, involved as much biting social satire as revelry after dark.

But this isn’t a Weimar Republic cabaret, old chum. This is Ventura. This is a party. This is a disco. This is strictly foolin’ around.

You walk up the dizzying, steep stairway of Club Soda, with diagonal black and white tile disorienting the unsuspecting visitor. If you are there on a Wednesday night--”Girls’ Night Out”--the fare is the thump-and-grind tease of male strippers who do their thing to loud dance music rattling the walls.

On those walls now rest several large, brightly colored paintings full of lounge-abouts and dancers writhing and twisting. One panel depicts an otherworldly rock band in action. Anyone looking for traditional high art here is looking in the wrong place. The Greek-born Lekakis and Bolin, who lived in Santa Barbara for two years and in Ventura for one year, deal in campy neo-primitive figures, which are marked by exaggerated features, harsh angles and seductive curves, in states of apparent late-night ecstasy.

One eye-catching painting, called “The Visitor,” finds a scantily clad woman conversing with an angular man. Is it love or just a business transaction in the offing? A text by Lekakis on the painting reads: “Service of love my moment has come like blue smoke in the bar mood of blue love.” Blue is the operative word.

Toward the back bar, which houses an aquarium, one wall has been decorated with fanciful depictions of sea life--as much figments of the creative imagination as genuine aquatic illustration. Over the main bar is a caricature of owner Michael Avrea, equipped with a halo (an art patron saint?).

Art belongs in public places. Avrea, who with his brother Jim opened Club Soda in 1984 on the former site of the Moose Lodge, had been in the market for a new look and artists with the right stuff.

“I was thinking about using original art in here and had talked to some artists in Ventura,” he said in the club recently as female customers ogled the disrobing talent across the room. “Then, out of the blue, (Bolin and Lekakis) called me. I had a gut feeling that it was right.” Avrea commissioned the pair to create these images-- their last local artistic act before heading to Europe for an undetermined time.

How long will this art be a part of the Club Soda scene? “Probably for a couple of years,” Avrea said, shrugging. “There are no pat formulas here.” He can say that again.

Speaking of art beyond gallery walls, the “Visions XVI” show is hidden deep in Oxnard’s financial plaza. Tucked away on the second floor of the huge Ventura County Bank building, the exhibition features the work of artists on the faculty of Ventura College. Photography, watercolor and collage are the principal mediums, and several pieces vie for your attention.

Aiming at the timely subject of censorship hysteria, Bunny Jennings goes for the jugular with a rubber knife. Done with tongue firmly in cheek, Jennings’ “Censored Treasures (Blame Jesse Helms)” series shows color Xeroxes of classic artworks with the “naughty parts” covered up. Michelangelo’s David is fitted with a swimsuit and Adam from the Sistine Chapel atones for original sin by donning bikini briefs.

Painter Roseanne Holmes Oberboe’s “Clearing After the Rains at Giverny” is an impressionistic homage to Claude Monet, while Marla Burg paints raw, vivid domestic scenes divided into panels.

A chilling juxtaposition gives Richard Peterson’s “It Is Finished” its potency. In the foreground, we see a deceased AIDS patient being unceremoniously removed from his final resting place by hospital orderlies. On the hospital wall hangs an image of Christ’s body (one of the Catholic stations of the cross) in a similar pose, being removed from the cross. A holy martyr’s finale contrasts with an impersonal one.

Far more abstract interests guide Gerd Kock’s paintings, which boast cascades of color and vague references to landscape painting. In “Portal to Reality--An Etruscan Dream,” Kock delicately balances the real and the unreal to tap into the mysterious legacy of the Italian Etruscan subculture.

Up the Coast :

* Lushly vegetated and maze-like in design, the Westmont College campus has always been a strange, beautiful oasis in Montecito. The Art Gallery there, once you find it, has been known to hold fine and provocative shows--as witness the previous Art/Life show and the current exhibition of unorthodox print works by Santa Fe artist Ron Pokrasso.

Pokrasso’s jagged-edge collages and general approach to the picture frame may look familiar to anyone who has seen the work of Anthony Askew, Westmont’s art department head. Askew has studied at Pokrasso’s renowned workshops in Santa Fe and arranged for Pokrasso’s show here.

The show’s title, “If I Knew Where I Was Going, I’d Be Lost,” isn’t as flippant as you might expect. Pokrasso’s pieces don’t relax or rely on easy formula. Scrawls, brush strokes, scrapings, washes, cut-up fragments--even scraps of foam--are part of the overall design. Out of his agitated surfaces often emerge some human or natural element, unfinished images of bodies or trees giving structure to the restless compositions.

With his aggressive blend of the familiar and the non-representational, Pokrasso’s style is reminiscent of the contemporary English painter Francis Bacon, albeit in a lighter mood. The best pieces call upon the irrational logic of dreams. Poetic titles enhance the imagery in “Dreams . . . Like Empty Space” and “A Row of Trees Tames a Breeze.” Best of all is “Russian Olive,” a coolly elegant vision sitting calmly in a corner of the gallery. It speaks softly but persuasively.

* In honor of Black History Month, the UC Santa Barbara Art Museum is holding two fascinating shows, both of which qualify for the bring-the-whole-family seal of approval. “Fighting With Art: Appliqued Flags of the Fante Asafo” is a display of disarmingly charming flags illustrating villagers, machinery, animals, fantasies and historical anecdotes. The innocence of the flag art belies the fact that they were created in “asafos,” military institutions in West Africa. “Deceptive Realities” is a varied collection of African artifacts, including sculptures, pendants and totems.

For a dose of self-induced culture shock, head to the back gallery, where Patrice Caire’s “Commuters” consumes the walls and floor space. The fourth installment of the conceptual art-oriented “Margins” series deals with a tangle of artifacts from another, post-modern art world village.

* WHERE AND WHEN

* Cindy Bolin and Kostas Lekakis, painting and woodcuts at Club Soda, 317 E. Main St.

* “Visions XVI,” art by Ventura College faculty members, at Ventura County Bank, 500 Esplanade Drive, through March 14.

* Ron Pokrasso, print works at Westmont College Gallery through March 1.

* “Deceptive Realities” and “Fighting With Art: Appliqued Flags of the Fante Asafo,” at the UCSB Art Museum through February.