The act of viewing is part of the art

On first approach, "neonoir," the current exhibition at Howard House art gallery, seems to be a rather straightforward show of paintings with a dark sensibility and the use of dark colors. Some of the works are gripping and some are less so, but as a whole, the exhibition proves that an interesting theme and thoughtfully-chosen works can add layers of nuance and meaning.

"Noir" refers to the black-and-white movies of the 1940s and '50s, a superficially conservative era that projected its hidden desires and fears onto the big screen. These film-noir dramas were fraught with thinly disguised sexuality and moral ambiguity, but those very elements of desire and immorality were also safely framed and removed from people's daily existence through stylish cinematography.

The paintings in "neonoir" don't necessarily take their subject matter from the seedy glamour of film noir, but many are similarly brooding, gritty and stylish. Guest curator Cameron Martin, a well-known Seattle-raised, New York-based painter who has shown with Howard House, selected the works because they evoke a "particular interpretive effect."

This "interpretive effect" is what makes the paintings in the show worth a longer look. They seem to be one thing at first and then another; they draw you in and shift about. More than anything else, they make you think about how viewing can cause both pleasure and discomfort.

Judith Eisler's big painting called "Faye and Steve," is a close-up of two mouths, open and ready to kiss. We recognize the moment and the passion instantly, but the scene is hard to grasp — the mouths seem anonymous and ambiguous in terms of gender and precise emotion. The slightly out-of-focus and cropped effect, along with Eisler's painterly style and use of fleshy colors overcast with lots of dark tones, create a blend of realism and abstraction. We respond with an uneasy mix of intimate identification and embarrassed voyeurism. Speculating that the "Faye and Steve" of the painting's title are Faye Dunaway and Steve McQueen adds comfort and another layer of awkward desire. This identification brings the self-conscious viewing experience back into the realm of pop culture, yet Eisler's style thwarts our desire to know who is who in the scene, and underscores the sense of misplaced infatuation.

Helen Sadler also plays with scale and pop culture, but her works are just four inches square. These are images we've seen before — screaming fans, a film still from the movie "Carrie" — that could be cut out from magazines. In fact, they are haunting little paintings. Sadler has (lovingly?) painted copies of these well-known images. In "Beatles Fan (1968)," Sadler has created a realistic, but still brushy, close-up of an ecstatic fan whose extreme emotion is packed into Sadler's small panel. The intimate view of the fan and the small scale causes both discomfort and pleasure through recognition — we identify the familiar image from the world of pop culture, and recognize and recoil from those intense emotions within ourselves.

Dike Blair's untitled painting also makes us think about how things are re-presented through paint. Blair shows us a section of a parking lot, done in a realistic, trompe-l'oeil style. Trompe l'oeil, where the image is so realistic that it fools the eye into thinking it's a real (i.e., not painted) object, has been around for a long time, but Blair's work isn't simple, deftly-created visual trickery. It plays on ideas about an artist's act of representation and a viewer's process of perception. His amazingly realistic rendering of the paved ground is re-presented and framed, hanging on the wall. The framing is important here — our attention is called to the fact that Blair has created his gouache painting on paper — a world of asphalt represented on a thin sheet of paper for us to get lost in.

Eisler, Sadler and Blair's paintings are far and away the three most exciting works in this show. Some of the other pieces are just not that thrilling in and of themselves, but they do work well to propel the theme of exhibition in slightly different directions.

In some ways, the paintings in "neonoir" are like watching old noir films on your TV at home. The viewing experience may be less gritty and involving, but it's still full of longing and pleasure.