Before "Un Chien Andalou" in 1928, with its pay-attention-please sliced-open eye as intro, there was Odilon Redon, who wanted 19th-century Paris to know that eyes are in the head for a reason.

Odilon Redon. (French, 1840-1916). "L'Oeil, comme un ballon bizarre se dirige vers l'infini" ("The Eye Like a Strange Balloon Mounts Toward Infinity"), 1882. Lithograph, 10-3/16 x 7-11/16 inches. Image via Museum of Modern Art.

Considered excessively odd in his own time, Redon just missed living long enough to be hailed as the sanest man in the room. For surrealists, he was the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

Almost a century after Surrealism's first forays, it is no longer a movement to be studied and shelved. Today it's something like a temperment: Corny to the sunlit and clearheaded, but to the myth-minded, it is genetics, evolution, gravity and photosynthesis. Most remarkably, the range within the category is enormous.

Back to eyes. Painters who move them around the head have instant Pop Surrealism credentials:

Marion Peck, "Kittens," 2006. Oil/canvas. Image via artmoco.

Then there's Sherry Markovitz, who paints memory. Working in gouache on silk, she throws her first drafts in the washing machine and dries them on a clothesline. Beside the leftover ghost images, she paints more immediate sensations, moving eyes around for psychological depth expressed as elegaic shock.

Sherry Markovitz, "Mothers and Daughters," 2007. Gouache, velvet and beads on silk, 42 x 45 inches. Image via Greg Kucera Gallery.

Sherry Markovitz, "Split," 2007. Gouache on silk with embroidery, 66 x 44 inches. Image via Greg Kucera Gallery.

Markovitz uses floating eyes to suggest fluid connections, while Brian Mallman floats them for distance. I'm quite taken with his odd-man-out pencil drawing on board, here, at Migration: A Gallery, from Charlottesville, Va., via C-Monster.

For Chisten Mattix, the eye is its own garden, a high romance stripped of Redon's innate alienation. This painter might have been born too late. In San Francisco in the mid '60s, she would have been huge.

Chisten Mattix, "You Are The Landscape" (detail), 2008. Oil on canvas. (Mattix opens at Shift Gallery, 306 S. Washington St. in Pioneer Square July 3.)