Expressing Themselves: Two solo shows feature distinct approaches to to the influences of expressionistic methods of figure painting

It has been about 35 years since figurative painting re-emerged as a vital form of contemporary art after several decades in the shadow of abstraction and conceptual art. Key to that development was the increasing popularity of an expressionistic strain of figure-painting sometimes called Neo-Expressionism. This approach to painting -- itself something of a throwback to German Expressionism -- has been continually revisited by later generations of artists, including two who now have solo shows in the Downtown Arts District.

One of them is John Peres Bruno of Nashville, Tenn., who has a solo exhibition on view at 5ive & 40rty. The other is Winston-Salem artist Peter Spivak, whose paintings and works on paper are on view at Urban Artware.

Based on the evidence at 5ive & 40rty, Bruno is a multitalented if unabashedly undisciplined artist with an affinity for transgressive imagery and a highly developed sense of the absurd. The show includes a few drawings and a small sculpture, but it is

dominated by 11 paintings that range in scale from compact to heroic. Collectively these works constitute a

satirically infused meditation on human folly and degradation. A sign posted on the gallery's door warns that the show might not be suitable for younger viewers.

Bruno targets celebrity culture in two paintings -- a straightforwardly appropriated image of film actress Sharon Tate (murdered 40 years ago by members of Charles Manson's cult) nude in a bubble bath; and a surrealist portrait of contemporary film star Gwyneth Paltrow. In the latter painting, Gwynneth x 3, Paltrow stands in a black dress, waving and smiling as if there were nothing unusual about the fleshy-looking, convolutedly shaped growth emerging from her abdomen.

On a more serious note, Bruno's painting titled Women & Children -- an image of a giant, gaping mouth on the verge of devouring two anguished-looking, black-veiled women -- is an effective statement about war and its most vulnerable victims.

The largest and most ambitious of Bruno's paintings -- not to mention the most irreverent -- is Judgment, a roughly 9-by-10-foot composition made up of 10 variously sized, interconnected canvases. Its dominant figure is a blonde, red-robed Jesus who uses a hammer to brutally assault a nude man in the midst of a graphically depicted sex act with a woman, also nude and very revealingly posed. Somewhat jarringly juxtaposed with this startling scene of carnal and violent interaction are canvases containing a Swiss mountain landscape, a floral still life and a row of red, upside-down paint drips on a black background. Finally, painted in the canvas at the lower right, a big red kidney bean serves as a backdrop for a smaller image of a female nude and lines of small, hand-painted text that continually repeat a crude children's rhyme about bean consumption and flatulence. Equating sex with unpardonable sin, the piece is a deliberately shocking treatment of a familiar biblical theme. For such a formally complex and thematically challenging work, it comes off looking like an unresolved effort that was rushed to meet a deadline.

A few of Bruno's smaller paintings look even more hastily dashed off, but two of his paintings that stand out more promisingly are Jody, an otherwise mysterious, yellow-tinged portrait of a woman making an obscene hand gesture; and a triptych titled You Say Tomato, an ironic pop-art treatment of race-and gender-related issues.

Around the corner

Spivak's show at Urban Artware is squeezed into a back corner, but there's plenty to see in this untitled selection. A scattershot survey of his work made over the past 12 years, it consists of 18 paintings and 20 works on paper, all relatively compact. Solitary figures and small figure groupings are loosely rendered in muted colors against neutral grounds in most of these paintings. Their simplicity is such that Spivak's work in this vein was sometimes shown in "outsider" art exhibits in the late 1990s, even though he is a university-trained artist.

Spivak's painting titled Yes, Deer is stylistically similar to, but more formally complex than, most of the other paintings here. Its assorted collection of sketchily rendered figures and faintly scrawled notational texts is visually dominated by the larger, menacing-looking image of a snarling dog crowned with a pair of deer horns, boldly delineated in red.

More finely detailed and formally sophisticated than the paintings, Spivak's collages and other works on paper require closer scrutiny. A cutout rendering of a black machine gun and cutout bullets are set off against appropriated images of innocent-looking children and related imagery arranged in a loose grid in his collage titled Columbine, a visual meditation on adolescence, violence and the easy availability of assault weapons.

Spivak comments ironically on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq in his collage titled America -- F#@k Yeah!, in which a man in a red, white and blue Uncle Sam outfit appears to race exultantly toward a fiery explosion on the horizon of a desert landscape, meanwhile stomping on the back of a figure who suggests a Muslim bowing in prayer.

A more deadpan, nontopical strain of humor infuses Spivak's piece consisting of a taped-up slab of corrugated cardboard with neatly cutout letters spelling the admonition, "VANDALISM IS WRONG." It's one of the few nonfigurative pieces in the show.

■ John Peres Bruno's "It Was Just a Joke" is on view through Sept. 12 at 5ive & 40rty, 541-A N. Trade St. Call 724-2474. An untitled show of works by Peter Spivak is on view through Sept. 4 at Urban Artware, 207 W. Sixth St. Call 722-2345.