Two Time Travelers

Those eyes. The head is slightly bowed. Strands of dark hair snake around her shoulders.

But it’s the smoldering dark eyes outlined in black that form the magnetic core of nearly every painting and photograph in “A Little Show for Sara,” Frank Minuto’s solo show at Angels Gate Cultural Center on view through April 15. Although it’s titled “a little show…” paintings and photos wallpaper a downstairs hallway at the center’s Gallery A and continue upstairs.

Minuto, a popular teacher at the Palos Verdes Art Center, first met Sara Streeter five years ago when she modeled for a workshop at Angels Gate, where Minuto has his studio. In the former ballet dancer he saw more than a model.

Streeter did more than just hold a pose. With a few props and yards of cloth she could embody the spirit of another time and place.

We’re not talking about historical accuracy here. In the studio the duo collaborate to create scenes of Paris in the 1920s, Las Vegas in the ‘50s and ancient Egypt as they existed only in fantasy – Minuto’s own and the fantasy of his artistic forebears.

Some critics see Matisse’s depictions of models in make-believe settings of the “exotic East” as tainted by colonialism, but Minuto is not worried about political correctness. He is traveling through a dream world of color, pattern and imagined pleasure. Reality never gets in the way.

According to Minuto, Streeter doesn’t just pose. She observes the setting he has created from cushions, fabric and mirrors in his tiny former army-barracks studio and watches a video or two about the period. Then she reaches into the sack she brings with her, pulls out some cloth and magically creates a costume.

“She becomes the character,” he says. And his camera clicks away as she powders her face, sips a “cocktail,” tells a fortune or smokes (a nasty bit of business she does only for art).

The carefully lighted photographs are works of art in themselves. Many of them are displayed in the show. Their black-and-white or sepia tones lend them a historical feel. The paintings, on the other hand, are saturated with Minuto’s trademark intense colors.

In style, the paintings pay tribute to Minuto’s favorite schools of art, the Fauves (or “Wild Beasts” of the first decade of the 20^th century) and the German Expressionists. Both schools were known for using flat areas of throbbing color, often outlined in black, an approach typical of most of Minuto’s work. Like Matisse, Minuto also loves pattern and it frequently appears in the fabric backdrops.

The paintings pay homage to earlier artists, but remain recognizably Minutoesque. The poison green against ripe red in “The Cat and the Crow” recalls Kirschner. The pulsating colors, tilting perspective and masklike faces in “Paris” bring to mind Nolde and the fluid lines of the monochrome nude viewed from the back, “Sara” echo Schiele.

Minuto likens the lighter colors and delicate outlines of “The Travelers” to work of Dufy, but this painting is tighter and more formal than his, with a tribute to Matisse in the patterned background.

One work has a distinctly different style. Streeter herself created the large abstract charcoal drawing at the back of the upstairs gallery. The whirling lines on paper record her arm movements as she danced nude to Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring.”

The intense color, pattern and outlining seen in the “Sara” series carries over from Minuto’s earlier landscapes and his other fantasy series: Toy Robots. But Sara Streeter, seen in person at the opening reception, seems to have stepped out of one of Frank Minuto’s paintings. Her black-rimmed eyes and sinuously curling strands of dark hair already form the outlines of the painting.

Guests pose at the vanity table with the mirror ringed with lights, the setting for the “backstage at the Stardust” series. But none can match Sara’s look when she takes her place before the mirror.