Shura Petrov: Reveling In The Unexpected

Art review Shura Petrov, paintings, opening reception 6 to 8 p.m. today, with aboriginal prints from Australia (through Nov. 27). Davidson Galleries, 313 Occidental Ave. S.; 624-7684. 11 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Monday through Saturday.

Three years ago gallery owner Sam Davidson went to Russia, scouting for artists. One of those he found was Shura Petrov, who made his living as a set designer for the Kirov and moonlighted as a painter of decorative lacquered boxes and eggs.

In the back of his St. Petersburg studio, Petrov stacked the canvases that couldn't be shown in Russia, not only because there was no commercial market there, but because they would have been judged decadent, filled as they were with lust, blood, and make-believe. Davidson brought back some of Petrov's canvases for a show of Russian art that coincided with the Goodwill Games in Seattle.

Petrov, in the meantime, traveled to Munich, where he'd been asked to restore some icons. When it transpired that the "restoration" wanted was to make 19th-century icons look as if they were made in the 17th century, Petrov quit.

A year and a half ago, with Davidson as their sponsor, Petrov and his wife, a costume designer, immigrated to the U.S. They'd like to stay. But that may not be possible.

More than a dozen museum and gallery representatives have written to Bureau of Immigration officials in support of the Petrovs' application, but so far, immigration officials aren't

impressed. As Petrov's show this month makes clear, he is highly skilled, and deliciously inventive.

Several themes run through Petrov's art. His Felliniesque processional paintings are composed of characters bizarre beyond imagining, as arcane and seductive as if they had swum to the surface of consciousness from a troubled dream.

A series of butcher paintings allow Petrov the opportunity for repeat images of bulls - a shape at which he excels, painting in every sinew and muscle in exaggerated relief. Bulls' heads hang from unlikely places, but Petrov never revels in gore - only in the unexpected.

A muted glossiness overlies but does not soften either the scenes, or the stern figures who people them. A static quality imbues his figures. Embracing lovers seem as inert as if they had been transformed into pillars of salt an instant before, and would never move again.

Several of Petrov's paintings, in which a sense of dread overwhelms ostensible play, appear to be political allegories. Mannequins hanging on a wall speak of conformity and automatons. Flames consume the sky behind spectators watching a performing acrobat.

At his best, Petrov's enigmatic scenes strike the resonant chord of myth - men holding up ladders toward heaven, where a pair of embracing angels hover, while in the background a Gothic cathedral leans like a collapsing confection.

Upstairs, the Davidson Galleries are hosting the first Seattle showing of aboriginal Australian print art. The iconography is drawn from song and story cycles that relate to land familiar to aboriginal tribes for thousands of years.