"Queen and Country" at Alameda's Autobody Fine Art is an eyeful. It is a surprise and delight to see walls altogether covered in unapologetic oil painting.

   Three artists; Dickson Schneider, Richard Kramer and Raymond Wong use contemporary figuration as a means to explore new issues in social realism. By that I do not mean socialist realism but other examinations of society in this case manipulating figures and their contexts.

  In the case of Richard Kramer whose father was a fanatic shutterbug, this exhaustive record of his youth becomes the foundation for creative self examination in the hands of an adult artist.  The works have not yet transcended their source material but there is some fine painting and an alienation from self that seems true. I too look at childhood pictures asking "Is that me?" not able to tell myself from another family member. This leads to "Who the hell am I?", an excellent question for art to present.

    Raymond Wong takes fat, buttery, brush strokes and builds images of  men and women (mostly Asian) in incongruous settings. What is that North Korean student doing at Office Depot?

  In "Deracination", a female clerk on cigarette break flees. A velvet rope isolates depression bread liners dressed in People's  Army uniform behind. The overall effect is alienation and absurdity or maybe the alienation of absurdity. The background crowd may be psychological history or the internal world of this protagonist. Like eating cornflakes the day after your father dies, normal becomes freakish in proximity to catastrophe.

  Dickson Schneider places figures in an art filled world. The featured women and men are drawn from fashion advertising, bringing with them the beauty and distortion of that genre, lovingly rendered. At their best they are seductive and disturbing. This conflicted  premise makes the works easy to misunderstand. Viewers enamored of fashion, love the slick pretty. Skeptics who reject the contrivance of popular culture, laugh. I spoke to a woman who thought one attenuated figure (Ecstasy of Mondrian) was beautiful but similar distortions in another painting, incompetent. And yet, she was troubled by her conclusion.

 The point of the work is to hold both; to be able to see the beauty and the distortion. I see them as two conflicting realities, and that's just the figures in the foreground. Behind the cavorting  models are artworks which frame the figure. In other instances, art images cut in as additional figures entering the scene.

The works of all three artists share foundational concerns; love of paint and painting, figuration and an inclination to big questions and seeking answers in the work. This visible kinship comes naturally. Schneider is an instructor in painting at Cal State East Bay. Kramer and Wong studied painting with him as undergraduates.

The two younger artists are clearly emerging. Their paintings are not yet fully grown. But they are on their way. It is rare to see young artists try hard on large visible canvases with so little apology for either the painting or the trying. Schnieder, in turn, is a master working towards a masterpiece; the moment when material, process, technique and subject gel into a new whole.

One candidate for masterpiece is "Fragonard." A black woman, blue eyed, blonde haired stares out at the viewer framed by a gold gilt painting filled with fluffy naked white women in the style of Fragonard. (Fragonard made titillating paintings for 18^th Century gentlemen)

The background image shows this woman's socio-sexual context explaining the source of her blue eyed blondeness. Those features read as wrong and wonderful.  This sexual depiction excludes the black woman yet her blondness and blue-eyedness confront us. One fictive world in front of another.