Search for modern life's moral clarity unites two painters

Two intriguing shows in Boston art galleries, one about baseball and one about a half-forgotten movie from the '80s, have me thinking about the painting of modern life.

John Hull, a Colorado- based professor whose paintings are on view at Alpha Gallery, recently spent a season following the Wichita Wranglers farm league baseball team. With a loose, Manet-like touch, on small to medium-size and, in some cases, extra-wide canvases, he made a series of gently moody views of games in progress, practice sessions, spectators watching, and players just sitting around talking.

Meanwhile, Samson Projects offers paintings by Craig Drennen, who during the past five years has dedicated all his work to the movie "Supergirl," a 1984 box office bomb. (Drennen teaches at the Savannah College of Art and Design in Georgia.) Mixing the conceptualism of Marcel Duchamp and the semi-Pop, illustrative styles of Jasper Johns and Ed Ruscha , Drennen creates amalgams of abstraction, representation, and collage that meditate on celebrity, the mass media, and virtual reality.

On the face of it, these two artists would seem to be working opposite ends of the cultural spectrum.

With the paintings in his exhibition -- called "Pictures From the Phantom Zone" after an episode in "Supergirl" -- Drennen revels in the dizzying, often absurd disjunctions, contradictions, and complications of postmodernity. From his urbane perspective, spectral realities conjured by electronic media might matter as much as, if not more than, concretely real people, places and things.

In one painting, a ghostly portrait on a white square of "Supergirl" star Helen Slater appears to be pasted onto a panoramic field of vaporous, pinkish color. In a companion piece, the portrait has been reversed: Attached to another pink field is the carefully painted illusion of the back side of a canvas on its wooden stretcher, which you could mistake at first glance for the real thing.

In another series, the blocky letters VHS and DVD (old and new video formats) hover mysteriously against wide, gray, foggy skies like celestial messages from some electronic deity. Look closely and you discover they are three-dimensional constructions made of blue-lined notebook paper and masking tape, all neatly rendered in two dimensions by Drennen's finely tuned brush.

Hull's baseball paintings, on the other hand, suggest nostalgia for the days when people experienced life directly and for real, without the intervention of electronic technology. His paintings are based partly on photographs, but he makes them by hand, and he tries to capture how things really seem to the naked eye. They exhibit a compelling tension between their sensuous painted surfaces and the luminous, real-world spaces that they deftly evoke.

There's an undercurrent of sadness in Hull's paintings. Notice that the stands are mostly empty during games and that the fans you see up close look dazed and vaguely disconsolate. Nondescript buildings, electronic transmission towers, and other depressing features of the modern landscape rise up in the backgrounds of some pictures.

I'm struck especially by one wide-angle picture in which a young woman in a midriff- baring T-shirt and, a few feet away, a mountainous guy with a big gut watch from the foreground while far away the game goes on before a nearly vacant stadium. If the mordant short-story writer Raymond Carver made baseball paintings, they would look like this. It's called -- at least partly ironically, I have to believe -- "I Can't Think of a Place I'd Rather Be."

Is it too much of a stretch to see Hull's work as a portrait of red state America contemplating the decline of its own idealism in the Iraq War era?

In the past, Hull has painted images resembling low-budget action movie scenes with seedy characters involved in suspicious activities in rural places. Like those earlier works, Hull's baseball paintings are morality tales. Their poetic power is in how subtly they explore a longing for moral clarity that is hard to find in modern life. Major League Baseball, with its steroid scandals and exorbitant salaries, fails to deliver the kind of ennobling purity of purpose it once apparently did. But there might be hope for the farm league.

In a way, Drennen is not that far from Hull. His paintings are about cognitive disorientation, but they are also about moral confusion, about a world flooded by cheap entertainment in which it is hard to know not only what you can believe in but what is really worth believing in. What both artists admirably sustain is faith in the old-fashioned art of painting as a way to process the bewildering flux of contemporary experience.

Ken Johnson can be reached at kejohnson@globe.com.