San Diego Exhibits Feature Local Pride : The displays provide an interesting and informative look not only at the scenery and people of days gone by, but also at local artists and their influences.

Pride of place seems to be the curatorial condition in San Diego this summer. Local artists are featured in shows at the San Diego Museum of Art, the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art and numerous galleries throughout the county, among them a show of the work of Marie DuBarry at the First Street Gallery in Encinitas.

Bruce Kamerling, the San Diego Historical Society’s Curator of Collections, has been seriously smitten, too, and the evidence can now be seen in the show, “100 Years of Art in San Diego: Selections from the Collection of the San Diego Historical Society,” at the Museum of San Diego History.

A solid, historical show, well-researched and catalogued, “100 Years of Art” also includes a few mesmerizing paintings. Margaret (Margot) King Rocle’s stunning portrait of Eileen Jackson (circa 1939) fuses lush realism with tinges of the surreal. Eileen sits in a strapless gown, her gaze meandering to one side, while odd, sinuous strands of foliage sway in the vague space behind her.

The portrait hangs at the opposite end of the gallery from the earliest work in the show, also a portrait of a young woman, painted by Leonardo Barbieri in 1850. Together, these images show just how far a century spans. Barbieri and Rocle both rely on the same conventional format, posing their subjects in elegant dress against simple backgrounds and painting them from the waist up, but their effects differ mightily.

Barbieri’s sitter, Rosario Estudillo Aguirre, smiles agreeably if somewhat stiffly, adorned in a black, lace-trimmed dress, gloves and gold jewelry. She is entirely of this world, and the fine details of Barbieri’s rendering emphasize the materiality of her presence and possessions. Eileen, on the other hand, comes across as an ethereal being in Rocle’s portrait. She, too, is well modeled and has a magnetic presence, but it is diffused by her faraway gaze and the indefinite identity of the organic forms behind her.

Other highlights of the show include an exemplary landscape study by Maurice Braun, a touching narrative scene by Everett Gee Jackson and a sprightly lithograph of “San Diego Plaza” (now Horton Plaza Park) by Ivan Messenger. Lesser works by such local notables as Charles Arthur Fries, Alfred Mitchell, Belle Goldschlager Baranceanu and Ethel Greene are also here.

Informative throughout, many of the show’s 68 works (by 50 artists active between 1850, when California gained statehood, and the 1950s) are of scholarly interest only and fail to distinguish themselves otherwise. San Diego has long been a conservative town, and this show demonstrates that, in art, too, traditional portraiture, impressionistic landscape painting and a fairly generic form of realism dominated local production. Currents of modernism and abstraction touched the city only lightly during the century in question. The story of their full impact and of San Diego’s more recent blossoming as a regional center for the arts are left for later exhibitions.

Museum of San Diego History, Casa De Balboa Building, Balboa Park, open Wednesday through Sunday 10-4:30, through Oct. 20.

Missing from the San Diego Historical Society’s show but deserving of at least a footnote in the chronicles of local art history is Marie DuBarry, whose work can be seen through July at the First Street Gallery in Encinitas. “Illumination on San Diego: The Plein-Air Paintings of Marie DuBarry from the 30s and 40s” features an ample array of small outdoor studies by the artist, who died last year at 93.

Neither innovative nor innocuous, DuBarry’s work nestles comfortably into that vast middle ground reserved for pleasant, attractive art of modest ambition. Born in Denver, DuBarry moved to San Diego alone at the age of 16. Here, she finished high school and studied under painter and printmaker Otto Schneider at the San Diego Academy of Fine Arts.

Like most of Southern California’s prewar landscape painters, DuBarry defined her subjects through brushy, Impressionistic dabs of color. She favored the “Eucalyptus School’s” muted palette of dust, gold and lavender to describe San Diego area trees, canyons and hills, but sporadically she extended her range and created passages of intense sensuality. In one painting, for instance, DuBarry seemed to sculpt hills out of glowing, muscular flesh. In another, she shadowed a tree with an unexpected swash of cobalt blue, and in another, set a cluster of chickens to rest in a pool of violet shade.

DuBarry’s views of unsullied nature clearly reveal her affection for the land. Her observations of animals and the shifting patterns of light and color feel tender, respectful. This warmth for her subjects makes DuBarry’s work appealing, despite its overall blandness.

First Street Gallery at the Lumberyard, 967 1st St., Encinitas. Open Monday through Saturday 10-6 and by appointment (753-5458) through July.

Fernando Lopez-Lage is a young Uruguayan painter whose brush overflows with passionate irreverence. In his first American show, at the Linda Moore Gallery in Mission Hills (and continuing down the block at Botanica Flowers and Gardens), Lopez-Lage defies the boundaries of polite restraint to indulge in an art of excess.

His large, unstretched canvases throb with color--gold, blood red, black, pink, blue, white, skeletal gray and the tone of sallow flesh. In these tight mosaics of pattern and figuration, Lopez-Lage fuses moments of pain, lust, hope, humor and sheer sensual reverie. Networks of personal and cultural symbols provide a certain structure to this wildly aggressive work. Some of the symbols can be deciphered--the nurse as an emblem of healing, for instance--while others remain opaque in meaning but generous in terms of pure formal power.

Crosses, halos, angels, virgins and burning candles give an air of Christian ritual to the work, but Lopez-Lage counters these symbols of spirituality with others of unabashed sensuality. Men and women both flaunt their sexuality, even to the point, in one painting, of engaging in a blatantly erotic act while under the watchful eye of a female saint. A spiked phallus spews stars in another, while a woman’s legs part to reveal an erupting volcano.

Lopez-Lage equates sex with pleasure and a release from the constraints of religious propriety, but he also unmasks its potential to be a grotesque act of violence. In several works, uniformed men stand with their pants lowered to their thighs, observing or engaging in bizarre physical acts. These paintings bring to mind the work of George Grosz, whose German industrialists and politicians of the 1920s were always shown with bulging crotches, indicating that their abuses of power were not only political, but physical as well.

Lopez-Lage hasn’t the visually refined weaponry of Grosz, nor his obvious targets. But with its surfaces of unabated intensity and scenes of unsavory instincts and unchecked urges, his work can certainly hold its own in terms of energy and potency.

Linda Moore Gallery, 1611 W. Lewis St., open Saturday 9-5, and Botanica Flowers and Gardens, 1633 W. Lewis St., open Saturday 8-6. The show ends today at both locations.

A common interest in spiritual themes has brought the work of Michael Golino and Matthew Chase together in a show at the David Lewinson Gallery. But, aside from this general thematic overlap, the two artists have little in common. Golino’s work owes its strength to an extraordinary formal elegance, while Chase practices a style of faux-naif simplicity.

Golino, a local artist, achieves an effect akin to industrial sensuousness in his “Lares” (titled with the ancient Roman name for a household deity), and other free-standing and wall-mounted sculptures. He sheathes them in skins of sheet lead, then uses domestic chemicals such as bleach, vinegar and ammonia to stain the surfaces with pools of green, yellow and magenta. When Golino incises lines in the lead, it is as if he is opening its rich veins, for saturate color clings to the edges of the furrows.

Whether shaped like an unfurled fan or a descending zigzag line, Golino’s works possess a commanding physical presence. Yet they are also delicate and poetic. Golino transfers photographic images onto the works and embosses them with words that touch on a variety of subjects, from the worship of the home and the destruction of the environment to the spiritual, psychological and physical power of words themselves.

The words nous (French for we) and noose appear together in one work, a bilingual pun that suggests the potential confinement of relationships. “An Incantation” spews a continuous stream of answers to the question of what Golino’s own expectations of his work might be: “An incantation an avocation a substantiation a repudiation a hesitation a deliberation a visitation a liberation a disintegration.” And, on one side of a small, house-shaped panel called “Lares, of home,” Golino stamps the words, “The (H)earth is a flower.” On the other, the gentle echo, “The Heart(h) is a flower.”

Though Golino’s work deliberates on both weighty and delicate matters, ultimately its beauty overwhelms all content. In these icons, form is god.

Chase, who lives in Santa Fe, presents three distinct types of work in this show: carved masks depicting figures from Greek mythology; small ossuaries, glass-encased shrines for human and animal bones; and wall-mounted assemblages on biblical themes. In addition to the diffusion of focus inherent in this display, Chase’s work also suffers from a slight confusion of tone. It hovers uneasily between the genuine and the contrived, between real folk spirituality and self-conscious primitivism.

What redeems the work from this schizophrenic bind is Chase’s adept manipulation of his materials. A tangle of old wire, painted blue, becomes a raging stream in “The Guardian Angel,” a tableau of poignancy and raw power. Two small figures cross over the stream on a wooden bridge, while hills of rusted metal rise in the background and an angel with actual bird feather wings looms above, warding off threats.

Works like this one show Chase to have a keen instinct for transforming the basest of materials into evocative form. Often, however, this effort is pushed too hard, and Chase’s earthy, earnest intentions yield only works of forced charm.

David Lewinson Gallery, Del Mar Plaza, 1555 Camino Del Mar, through Sunday. Open Saturday 10:30-9, Sunday 11-6.