REVIEW; BRUSH STROKES OF BIZARRENESS.

Byline: David Bloom Staff Writer

Despite its pedestrian-sounding title, ``Condo Painting'' is not Bob Vila's latest instructional video. Rather, it's about a notable recent American painter, George Condo, his creative spirit and his quirky, if not downright bizarre, notion of a world of imaginary creatures he calls the ``Antipodean beings.''

The Antipodes were the mysterious regions beyond North Africa that fearful Europeans, before the Age of Exploration, peopled with dragons, sea serpents and other fearsome if fanciful creatures. In short, the Antipodes were, and are, the unknown, the place pulled from the unconscious where fantasy and fear combine to create beings that don't exist but nonetheless have power.

Condo has been painting his notion of Antipodean residents for years now. The paintings look like some drug-assisted hybrid of Precious Moments collectibles and sad-faced clown Emmett Kelley Jr. Bizarre, but utterly engaging, they fascinate for no explicable reason, and maybe that's the point in painting them.

Condo creates huge canvases peopled with these creatures, using a confident craftsmanship and sweeping, just-right brush strokes to quickly evoke his visions. Director John McNaughton catches those brush strokes, sometimes in close-up and absorbing detail, in his documentary of Condo's work. When he follows the brush, and the creative process, the film is at its most interesting and engaging.

At the film's core is Condo's lengthy struggle with a specific canvas whose original Antipodean is shown painted in cheery colors against a bubblegum-pink background.

Over more than a year's time, though, a frustrated Condo will paint in an additional smaller Antipodean, paint cloudlike mists onto the background, paint over the background, paint over the Antipodeans and paint a new, more somber resident.

In that time, he tells the camera, he has signed the picture three times. Finally, he steps back and, with his wife, surveys the now-finished work with some adequate measure of satisfaction.

It's this sort of scene that redeems a film otherwise marred by impenetrable selndulgences, almost all of which revolve around a dancing man (Condo's brother-in-law) in a business suit and Technicolor long wig and clown mask.

The dancing creature is meant to represent a living Antipodean, and at one point, Condo uses a goofball faux device he calls a ``Podfinder'' to chase down the creature in a junkyard.

In a film about the painter's attempts to bring these creatures out of his subconscious and onto the canvas, such scenes must have made some sort of wacky sense to Condo and McNaughton, who co-wrote the film. Transmitted to screen, however, they just don't work, either as humor, magical realism or some sort of offbeat commentary on what's inside the artist's head. They are, in fact, more off-putting than offbeat.

McNaughton is a veteran director of quality TV and such diverse films as ``Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer,'' ``Wild Things,'' ``The Borrowers'' and ``Mad Dog & Glory.'' In this film, his ninth, he uses a variety of visual technological tricks available when the film was being made in 1996 and 1997 to create a different, purposely painterly look.

That bag of digital tricks generally works well enough, and certainly watching an excellent and talented young painter in the struggle of creation can be absorbing. But perhaps we should leave the Antipodeans where they belong, on the canvas, and in Condo's fertile mind.

The facts

--The film: ``Condo Painting'' (not rated; no violent or sexual content but occasional odd and disturbing images).

--The stars: George Condo.

--Behind the scenes: Directed by John McNaughton. Written by McNaughton and Condo. Released by USA Films.

--Running time: One hour, 27 minutes

--Playing: Selected theaters.

--Our rating: Two and one half stars.

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Photo: George Condo, above, works on one of his fanciful canvases while John McNaughton films him for ``Condo Painting.''