The premise of the Balcony Gallery exhibition, "Couples: Making Art Under One Roof," is artist-couples: two visual artists who also happen to cohabit. Similar shows have been organized before, elsewhere, and the theme — an intoxicating stew of gender and power and eye candy — never fails to titillate.

Behind the voyeuristic intrigue, questions: Can two intimates maintain creative borders? And is doing so beneficial, or even necessary? Does their relationship bleed into their work, formally, thematically or otherwise? Can they sustain their union and art — and egos — when one career leaves the other in the dust?

And, in the People magazine query mode, what's really happening behind closed doors? Inquiring minds wanna know.

Hollywood has jumped on this aesthetic love boat several times, dishing about ill-fated artistic twosomes and their explicit dirt (especially the dirt): Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner, Camille Claudel and Auguste Rodin.

But they've skimmed over the au courant topic of women versus men. As in, women artists who stand by, and so professionally behind, their artist men.

That list is long: Claudel, thought to have been a force behind Rodin's best work; Krasner, often credited with keeping Pollock together long enough for him to "break it wide open" (her rapt line, to him, in the Hollywood script); Paula Modersohn-Becker, a painter highly conflicted about potential motherhood, who died of childbirth complications; Jeanne-Claude, environmental artist Christo's long-term silent partner, whose name only recently emerged in revised art historical texts; etc.

And Tinseltown has skipped, as this show does, the less glamorized (pre-Brokeback) single-sex partnerships, such as those rumored to have taken place between young Pop artists Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, or enduring collaborators Gilbert and George.

Within this context, "Couples" generally languishes for want of conscious, curatorial shape. Much of the work, self-selected by the invited artists, seems not necessarily made or chosen with the theme in mind — unless the intent was to show how different the artists are, despite their relationship.

The installation also confounds connections. Several pairs, such as Ron and Kit Kowalke, are awkwardly separated — likely because of space constraints — by architectural beams, floor lengths, windows, corners and even other couples' work. Signage gives little guidance. Without visual delineation, the relationships, comparisons and contrasts remain obscure.

And the sheer number of artists (13 pairs, or 26), given such intimate space, ensures that this visual anthology lacks depth, short-shifting both the theme and some of the very fine invited artists.

More stimulating, perhaps, would have been a show that focused on fewer couples, more consciously and deeply probing the connections and complications to determine what — if anything — they would yield.

But maybe any such examination would be fraught, as is the theme. After all, artists are, chiefly, individuals (unless they are collaborators). And what individual wants to be defined or known as half of a pair?

That said, some interesting connections emerge, several helped by clear pairings of the artist-couples' work within the exhibition layout.

Side-by-side canvases by Alan and Birgitta Leitner offer similar content used to different ends. His is layered, nuanced — the subject as much the surface and paint itself as the early-stage plant form it depicts. In hers, a close-up of a late-stage plant form, paint is subsumed by the unwavering, symbolic examination of decay.

Similarly, small-scale paintings by Masami Teraoka and Lynda Hesse treat a subject — fertility and the life cycle — with divergent visions. Hers is a joyful, tensile and stylized circle dance between male and female figures, a la Matisse. His minute, charmingly rendered and pregnant Madonna (sans clothes) harks back to earlier masters — more about veneration than celebration.

May Izumi and Byron Inouye both work within the trendy, Japanese-inspired, cute-kitsch-pop aesthetic. Izumi's cuddly fiber "predator-resistant GMO sheep" wields nasty, curled metal toenails. Inouye's small-scale acrylic diptych floats two childlike felines against bright backgrounds. Possibly referencing the recent film "The Squid and the Whale," the sweet anthropomorphic figures allude to something darker.

Then there are those visual couplings that resist tidy comparison, but still make intuitive sense. Carl and Tammy Jennings' works, for example, evoke sensuality: hers, a photographic triptych that employs gendered imagery (flowers, soft skin); and his, a painting that in color, theme and composition recalls male-female balance.

Or consider the unlikely pairing of Elizabeth Train's fibrous cascade, fashioned finely — and implausibly — of knotted copper wire that ends in a loose fringe, with Yukio Ozaki's bulbous, planetary ceramic closed form. The two prove quirky and tactile complements.

In the end, public fascination with artist-couples may reveal more about the public than about the couples or their art. The subtext may well be that if love can make it here — among artists with their unconventional lifestyles, sensitive egos and bruisingly competitive pursuits — well, love can make it anywhere. Yet that particular subtext relies on stereotype.

The artists, ultimately, are just people who share common interests, careers and roofs. Sure, they may influence each other, visually and otherwise; but it's an easy assumption that this relationship weighs always — or even heavily — on their work.

Freelance writer Marie Carvalho covers art and literature.

'COUPLES: MAKING ART UNDER ONE ROOF'

THROUGH JULY 6

THE BALCONY GALLERY, 442-A ULUNIU ST., KAILUA

10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesdays-Saturdays, 2-5 p.m. second Sunday of each month

263-4434

review

'Couples' mingle at Balcony show