The new Nivada Gallery in Hillcrest (428...

The new Nivada Gallery in Hillcrest (428 Brookes Ave.) has taken a graceful and much appreciated step toward filling the gap created by the impending closing of the Quint and Patty Aande galleries.

Nivada’s second show, held in association with the Quint Gallery, presents recent “Work in Two Dimensions” by UC San Diego professor and living local treasure Italo Scanga. Scanga’s gouache and charcoal works on paper may be physically confined to two dimensions but they suggest the existence of several more.

Their fragmented, mosaic-like construction conveys a freedom from gravity and a liberty with varying conventions of representation. Traditional, illusionistic space collides with a modified Cubist vision and shatters the surface into a quilt of irregular chunks of color and form.

The components of this amalgam are images of houses, trees, dogs, birds and common domestic objects such as pitchers and a hinge, all rendered with a childlike simplicity. The forms serve as emblems of a certain security and stability but are embedded in an overall structure that is anything but static.

The syncopated rhythms within Scanga’s works derive in part from his Cubistic faceting of the surface and treatment of the entire rectangle--including the frame--as tangible space to be analyzed and transcribed in paint. Scanga personalizes the vocabulary of Picasso and Braque, dismissing their subdued palettes for a glowing Mediterranean spectrum of purple, green, umber, rust and ocher, but retaining their method of outlining shapes in black and occasionally applying a layer of dots to these defined regions to lend them variety and texture.

Scanga also recalls the Cubists in his rendering of elements from daily life, especially in “Untitled (Canine 79),” when he inserts numbers within the imagery. Music, another favorite theme of the Cubists, is referred to concretely in Scanga’s work through depiction of a musical note, or the edge of a violin, and also abstractly, in the paintings’ buoyant lyricism.

Scanga’s two-dimensional works thrive on internal combustion, an energy that the original Cubists usually sacrificed to a seriousness of purpose. Here, Scanga’s own weightier concerns, those manifested in his sculptural series on the theme of fear, for instance, are laid aside in the making of these visual scrapbooks, whose viewing offers unencumbered pleasure.

Ed Forde and Joanne Hayakawa’s clay sculpture on display at the Wita Gardiner Gallery (535 4th Ave.) affirms clay’s potential as both vessel for substance and vehicle for meaning.

Forde presents two series--a group of human-height columns, variably decorated but of little import, and several vases and pots. The latter possess great integrity and elegance. Forde’s two “Small Futurist Vases” revive the futurist mode of revealing through external form an object’s internal rhythms or lines of force.

Through the application of spiraling slabs of clay, writhing around the basic vase form, Forde transforms this static, symmetrical form into an organic and dynamic entity. Their gritty surfaces further lend the vases a feeling of raw power. Several larger vessels, such as the “Brown Ribbon Pot,” are similarly activated and bestowed with a human, balletic grace by means of channels swirling around the central bulk.

Hayakawa, like Forde, presents one series--her wall plates--that make too many concessions to a bland, decorative accessibility, and another that consists of fine sculptural statements. Hayakawa uses her medium diaristically, describing polarities within her own identity as well as the natural landscape. Her wall tableaux resemble private altars. Their wooden shelves hold the stuff of memories (photographs, letters, keys and flowers, all rendered in clay), while below them masks play out emotional dramas. In “Seeking a Contemplative Place,” the space below the shelf offers the artist’s alter-ego a refuge, uninterrupted by the accouterments of experience.

In “Confused Polarity,” similarly constructed, a mood swing has thrust the artist’s image into a state of torment. Jagged silver streaks slash across the mask, its eyes and mouth agape with anguish. Hayakawa’s expression of personal permutations, and her technical ability to render flames and flowers with equal conviction distinguish hers as a distinct and powerful voice.

Certain elements of her style, however--the jagged contours, neon colors and floating forms that she mocks in “Post This and Neo That”--feel too conciliatory to a trendy, new-wave aesthetic, giving her work a sugar coating that it could well survive without.

Both exhibitions continue through Aug. 1.