Sculptor Robert Brady shows maturity

Probably many people will recall the past two years in the bleakest terms, but not Northern California sculptor Robert Brady. His art has peaked repeatedly during the period, to judge by his show at Braunstein/Quay.

Brady appears to have pursued several strains of work concurrently, any one of which might have fleshed out a fully realized solo show.

Visitors familiar with his art will know the ancestry of a piece such as "Natoma I" (2009), a stooped human figure distended to praying- mantis proportions, its limbs suggestive of repurposed furniture legs or stair-rail spokes.

Brady has arched and angled the bodies of "Natoma I" and its two companions so that their heads droop, each in the form of a small sphere hanging by a thread. A touching air of abjection results, along with an unforced reference to the early 1930s work of Alberto Giacometti, offsetting the work's slightly comic exaggeration.

"Natoma I" chimes with the defeated mood of the moment, but its no less carefully considered pedestal sets up a faint echo of the auction block on which slaves once met their fates in the American South.

Such a reading would sound far-fetched did not Brady's thinking extend in so many directions. His work has long evoked tribal arts, for example, but seldom connected contemporary reality and their concerns with magic, ancestry and disguise as do his pieces titled "Big House."

Each of these painted wood wall works insinuates a combination of architectural profile and floor plan, a merger of mask and shield, plus a reckoning with minimalism that will surprise anyone who knows Brady's art.

With similar economy, the glazed ceramic piece "Spook" (2010) evokes associations as comic as cartoon ghosts and as serious a Ku Klux Klan hood and Robert Gober's sculptures in the form of de-plumbed porcelain sinks.

The maturity of Brady's new work, though, shows less in its beckoning of such readings than its not seeming to depend on them to look artistically alive.

Lydersen represents: Images put things on the minds of people who see them, hence the perennial power, seduction and danger of representation.

But as Dan Lydersen's work at Fischer confirms, realism in contemporary art proves itself best by getting us interested in what the painter has on his mind.

Lydersen tries to devise images adequate to the strangeness of American life today, the sense of its best days receding, of its toxic psychology leaking out through public and family life alike.

"Gone Tomorrow" (2010) offers a view of open prairie, disturbed first by a desiccated animal carcass in the foreground, then by a collapsed balloon in the middle ground, its gondola and passengers, if any, out of sight. Patient viewers will notice in the distance a figure that almost reads as an archer or as someone studying a map, or perhaps the painter himself sketching on a makeshift table. A discarded blue toy sports car in the foreground punctuates the picture's ironies: full stop.

Lydersen turns the obvious social and historical symbolism of the downed balloon and abandoned plaything toward a muted critique of the sentimental nationalism in Georgia O'Keeffe's Southwestern abstraction.

Other pictures here confront the corporate assault on childhood. "Ronald" (2010) - whose title incidentally evokes a controversial deceased president - shows a boy taking cover behind a boulder as a figure in Ronald Macdonald costume stands, perhaps calling out to him, in a red convertible with a big yellow roll bar where its windshield rim should be.

The thinking driving Lydersen's inventions still lags behind his technical finesse, but when they come into full alignment, watch out.

Robert Brady: New Work: Sculpture and drawings. Through Jan. 22. Braunstein/Quay Gallery, 430 Clementina St., S.F. (415) 278-9850. www.braunsteinquay.com.

Dan Lydersen: Blue Skies From Now On: Paintings. Through Jan. 22. Jack Fischer Gallery, 49 Geary St., S.F. (415) 956-1178. www.jackfischergallery.com.

E-mail Kenneth Baker at kennethbaker@sfchronicle.com.

This article appeared on page E - 2 of the San Francisco Chronicle