THE VALLEY

Ron Reeder treats familiar underwater subject matter to three media-related interpretations: delicately nuanced realism in color pencil, darkly mysterious romanticism in pastel, and flat illustration in watercolor. Liquid media might seem best suited to Reeder’s watery themes, but in the watercolors and one canvas he flattens space and squeezes out all the natural mystery of exotic fish and their environment. He shines when he draws, though, and even if doesn’t reveal anything new about his material he conveys the joy of sensitive observation.

Robin Ficara’s mixed-media paintings are far more hip exercises, but they have serious problems. These raw artworks--built to resemble skins stretched on lashed-together frames of pseudo tree branches and inspired by primitive and religious expressions--are so self-conscious that you see all the labor that has gone into them before you absorb the entity. Using a format of a picture within a picture, Ficara sets a small painting of an anguished figure, a couple of big teeth or nailed and bleeding feet in the center of a larger painting littered with spiky forms, painted serpents or objects stitched to the background. This art seems to aspire to an updated state of primitive magic--overlaid with religious ecstasy and contemporary terror--but it doesn’t feel authentic. (Orlando Gallery, 14553 Ventura Blvd., to Jan. 31.)