You see a lot of landscapes over couches and fireplaces, in hallways — anyplace people need to create happy windows to a world that is definitely not right beyond the wall.

Which is just fine. Even the ancient Greeks craved a nicer view.

In the Fine Arts Center’s new exhibition, “Personal Paradise: New Perspectives on Landscape Painting,” curator Tariana Nava-Nieves proposes an interesting twist on that familiar rubric: that the landscape can be more than painted postcards of the natural world; that for four artists here, anyway, it’s a mirror.

At first glance, “Personal Paradise” isn’t so different from “At the Foot of the Colorado Rockies,” an exhibition across the hall of Western landscapes from the Missouri collection of Jim and Virginia Moffett. There are mountains, streams, trees, cows.

“The artworks are as much about the outside world the artists observe as they are about the artists themselves,” writes Nava-Nieves in the first wall text.

And certainly, Argentinean artist Julia Fernandez-Pol plays with a completely abstracted vision of the landscape. Fractured prettily into Impressionistic chips of color, they are both micro and macro, internal and external. Her color palette is seductive, but look closer: the hues are oddly off, like a bruise on the way to disappearing. Step deeper into the cove of trees that seems to be “Chaos in Green” (2007), for example, and you’ll notice that something not quite right drips from the branches and a blue-cheese mold seems to grow in one corner of the canvas.

Like all of Fernandez-Pol’s work here, “Chaos” is explosively organic. Turn your back and you’d swear pieces were reproducing and rearranging themselves. Are they portraits of a place you’d never want to go — or are they the fevered (and obsessively well-crafted) machinations around her own personal grain of sand?

Either way, they’re pretty spectacular and endlessly engaging.

On the other end of the spectrum, the work of Idaho rancher Theodore Waddell sticks closest to traditional landscape in wide-open depictions of land and sky and nature. “Monida” (1999) is typical — a stunning triptych of soft colors, blurred black cows and Big Sky scale. Like just about any work that steps away from strict realism, standing close breaks the forms into pure pattern, an expressionistic slurry of paint, color, form and sometimes what amounts to just the hint of a mountain horizon line. Standing back draws it all into a view that’s almost like side-of-the-road poetry.

Is it significantly more than an “extrospective” process, as the curator suggests? I’m not so sure. Still, Waddell slyly slides into the work, like a ghost content to watch and not be seen. They are straight-out beautiful.

Nearby, Mexican painter Eric Pérez takes a few more steps away from painterly reportage with luminescent images of empty beaches, orchards and urban storms. But even before you notice the man treading water among tsunami-size waves or the dog poised nervously as rain approaches, you can feel there’s something amiss in these worlds. Here, the landscape is certainly a malleable stage for his concerns, whether emotional or social. Too often, though, the work swings from obvious metaphor (“Sierra Gorda, 2007,” in which a mountain threatens to slide on a swimming Pérez) to a narrative that most Americans would find inexplicable (“Mexico, 2008” depicts a real life event, the wall text says the rape and murder of 73-year-old Ernestina Rosario in Veracruz).

While Pérez is pinpoint specific in his psycho-real spaces, nearby, Kay WalkingStick, who is part Cherokee, makes richly painted and broadly imagined vistas which are often paired with apparent Indian patterns, as in “Nez Perce Crossing” (2008) or “Wallowa Mountains, Winter” (2003). These are confident images, muscular even, and focused on exploring duality. Of control and the uncontrollable; of faith and reason; of the land and the people.

—

Contact the writer at 476-1602 or tracy.mobleymartinez@gazette.com.

“Personal Paradise: Contemporary Perspectives on Landscape Painting”

When: Through Dec. 6

Where: The Fine Arts Center, 30 W. Dale St.

Admission: $10, $8.50 seniors/students; members free; also, free admission on Oct. 20

Something else: A tour of the show with curator Tariana Nava-Nieves at 6 p.m. Nov. 17, $7, $5 members

Marco Robinson, left, plays Eugene Jerome and his brother Oscar Robinson plays Stanley Jerome in ‘Broadway Bound.’ Photo by Courtesy of the Fine Arts Center