Paints of View : Five artists show the medium still has depths to explore and fences to leap.

The medium of painting recently has been reported dead, killed off by overuse and a destructive belief in its own centuries-old publicity as the art that matters.

The theory went that the formidable weight of art history crushed painting’s spirit and its validity as creative expression.

Such a supposed death knell led to an artistic rebirth. Coming out of the new investigation into what painting can be, the artists involved in the current group exhibition at the Platt Gallery of the University of Judaism, “5 Painters,” bring distinct and personalized attitudes to the venerable practice of applying paint to canvas.

The most impressive work here is by Eric Holzman, whose paintings come off as beautiful pictures that also function as observations from a necessarily detached vantage point, as painting about painting.

As he says in a statement, “paintings drop through cracks in time,” and his concerns are “form, spirit, honor, mystery.”

Art history hums beneath the surface effects in languid landscape works such as “The Big Tree at Crestwood” and the commanding “Evening, Late August, Bronx River” or his nude subjects. Details are blurred in a way that suggests the natural deterioration of paint in a time-weathered fresco.

In her own way, Peggy Schapp addresses the irresistible weight of art history, tinged with humor. “Jarcheology” presents three views of a vessel, the clearest being in the center, replete with a rough, tactile surface, while another depicts only outlines of the object, and the third is a hyper-closeup of the molecular makeup of the vessel.

Similar irony-flavored analysis, reflecting the perils of overly obsessive scrutiny of art icons, is behind the silhouetted figures in “Cezanne’s Portraits, Analyzed/Computerized.”

Of the bunch, Nick Bosckovich’s work speaks the softest in terms of scale. His photo realist still-life and cityscapes are the size of jumbo postcards.

Painting veers into sculpture for Frank J. Williams, whose works blend figurative elements and various ploys of obfuscation, often with striped, dripping swipes of color laid over figures.

“Inside/Outside,” painted on an actual wooden door, finds an image of a woman’s shadowy face peering ruefully as if through a window. By contrast, bold, startling simplicity is the key to “The Burning Flower,” a visual paradox that serves as a handy metaphor for volatile beauty.

The resident surrealist here is Ursula Wolf-Rottkay, who wields a fluid, goopy vocabulary of imagery to create dreamlike scenarios--not quite real, not quite irrational. Strange juxtapositions bubble up in her compositions, hinting at cosmic otherworlds or undersea civilizations, as in “Sun Rising Over Heavy Water.”

Such exploratory feats and easy leaps of imagination are part and parcel of this thing called painting, far from dead and full of promise.

BE THERE

“5 Painters,” through Aug. 22 at the Platt Gallery, University of Judaism, 15600 Mulholland Drive, Sepulveda Pass. (310) 476-9777, Ext. 203. Gallery hours: 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Sunday-Thursday, 10 a.m.-2 p.m. Friday. (310) 476-9777, Ext. 203.