Ventura County Weekend : Art : SIGHTS : Air of Mystery Pervades Expressionist Paintings : C. Stewart Parker’s new works capture a darkly ironic look, conjuring up scenes from Raymond Chandler.

C. Stewart Parker, the Ojai resident who first showed his cheeky, chic aesthetic at Wheeler Hot Springs in 1993, returns with a more vivid, charged-up group of paintings--hardly the usual artistic hors d’oeuvres that often characterize restaurant art.

These images seem to have bubbled up from some unconscious dimension where the disparate influences of the Expressionist Max Beckmann and Raymond Chandler rule.

As before, Stewart seems caught with his film noir fixation on his sleeve. Chandleresque men lurk through his paintings, hiding their true motives behind too-big overcoats and under post-war fedoras, while triangular plumes of smoke exude from their mouths. These are tough guys from another planet, metaphorical thugs and gumshoes.

In these scenes, we get a playful sense of a narrative in freeze-frame, in which something romantically sinister has just occurred or is about to happen.

This time out, though, Parker increases the heat of Expressionistic excess, dealing with mythical or religious settings. In intense pieces such as “Bonny Letter� and “Circus,� flames, an air of danger, intense colors and clashing snippets of imagery create a visual frenzy.

A more intimate painting, a diptych, finds a nude couple at a table, the gap between the panels bisecting a bottle--the source of both their allure and alienation?

Overall, this collection finds Parker deftly working a darkly humorous terrain, while also assuming a hipster’s ironic attitude.

College of Fine Art: The Ventura College art galleries have opened their portals--and not a moment too soon. Art watchers can expect to find finer art in the county at the college’s monthly shows.

In the New Media Gallery, North Dakota-based artist Brian Paulsen presents a quietly dynamic show of images that work individually and as a conceptual installation.

Paulsen explains in a statement that these images are conjured up through the filter of childhood memories, as “remembered visual experiences.� But innocence casts strange, often dark shadows here, and odd egg-shaped creatures fill in for human figures.

Paulsen manages a wonderfully fluid brand of surrealism with his finely rendered engravings and their full-color mirror images. This neatly divided gallery--half black and white, half color--ties in with the show’s overall celebration of duality. Always, Paulsen plays with double meanings and dark, potentially menacing subplots, and he enjoys tweaking scale and perspective. Nothing is as it seems.

Is that a costumed goblin or a KKK member by the campfire in “Scouting�? A woman in her underwear in “Bending, Sinking� appears to be exercising in a padded cell. In these dreamlike images, the flow of peculiar, conflicting memories carves its own swerving path through his mind.

At Gallery 2, Carol Saindon carries on her own internal dialogue, between two- and three-dimensional works. Her charcoal and silver pencil pieces on paper--the “Cycles and Clues� series--are triptychs of differing size panels, all swirling lines and shimmery surfaces suggesting cosmic energy forces.

Her sculptures, with boats fashioned from glass shards alongside natural elements of bones and stones, lend an earthy answer to the ethereal pieces on the walls.

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DETAILS

* AREA EXHIBITS: C. Stewart Parker, through Oct. 15 at Wheeler Hot Springs, 16825 Maricopa Highway, Ojai; 646-8131. Brian Paulsen and Carol Saindon through September at Ventura College, 4667 Telegraph Road, Ventura; 654-6468.