Virgil Marti will never forget the six-room crypt beneath the Capuchin Church of the Immaculate Conception in Rome.

There the Philadelphia-based installation artist beheld the bones of more than 4,000 Capuchin monks who died between 1528 and 1870.

Thousands of bones were nailed to the walls in intricate floral, cross and geometric patterns. Others hung from the ceiling as light fixtures. A large clock was composed of finger and foot bones and vertebrae.

In the last room, a placard warned: "What you are now we used to be, what we are now you will be."

Flash-forward 14 years to "Virgil Marti: Ah! Sunflower," the two-room installation at the True F. Luck Gallery at the Visual Arts Center of Richmond.

The Capuchin Crypt, with its overpowering sense of vanitas, is what Marti's Richmond installation is all about.

In the 16th and 17th centuries, Dutch and Flemish painters used vanitas symbols such as skulls, skeletons, hourglasses, fading flowers and rotting fruit to drive home the shortness of life and inevitability of death.

Marti brings the concept up to date with wallpaper consisting of ink-jet prints of photographs he took of memorial wreaths left by Elvis Presley fans at Graceland, then hand-flocked in his studio.

But direct references to the Capuchin Crypt are abundant as well.

"Memorial Garden," in which the wreaths glow as if under black-light against the dark background, decorates one wall in a somber room dedicated to nighttime.

On the opposite wall in the daytime room is a huge white installation in which resin-reinforced plastic bones are formed into floral patterns in low-relief.

The nighttime room offers two curtains made of goldand silver-plated plastic bones linked vertically in the manner of beaded door curtains.

Towering over the daytime room is a chandelier that Marti describes as "like crossing a hunt-lodge antler chandelier with a Venetian glass chandelier."

"I like taking things from seemingly disparate sources and meshing them together," the 45-year-old, soft-spoken Marti said in a recent gallery chat.

"If I take something from a high-art source and merge it with something from a low-art source, it's like silencing pretension. I like to silence pretension."

Completing the array are two poufs (circular sofas) and two ottomans that Marti designed and covered with lengths of printed fabrics. The largest pouf, which bridges the rooms, is somber on one side and colorful on the other.

Marti didn't set out to be an installation artist.

He majored in painting as an undergraduate at Washington University in his native St. Louis, Mo., and as a graduate student at Tyler School of Art in Elkins Park, Pa., part of Temple University.

But his career as an easel artist didn't last long.

"I had a problem confronting a blank canvas," he said. "What would I do? There were so many options and possibilities that what I finally did seemed arbitrary. I became less satisfied with making images of things. I wanted to make the things themselves.

"But I still think what I do is related to painting.

Marti ventured into installations as a graduate student.

"I started making installations," he said. "I was stretching fabric on walls to allude to wallpaper. Then I started making wallpapers. I thought of them as pictures that get attached to walls."

Marti has become especially known for his wallpapers as an extension of printmaking, especially those that actually require black light.

"I like making wallpapers because they have this temporal aspect to them," he said. "It's there for a while, and then it goes away. It has a life span.

"For me the interest in making wallpaper is in taking something that is considered a background and making it the foreground. It's a psychological, personal thing. That's why I don't hang things on my wallpaper. If I do, it becomes background again."

Marti acknowledges that his work elicits varied reactions.

"Some people respond to the things I make as kitsch or campy," he said. "Other people find them beautiful and luxurious.

"But it's the same object. Their response says more about their social background than the object itself. When people respond to it as kitsch, it bothers me because they don't think about it any further."

True F. Luck Gallery curator Ashley Kistler agrees.

"I don't think of it as kitsch at all," she said. "It's very serious work. Virgil's taste and references to kitsch is not an ironic investigation. It doesn't have an ironic tone. His work is a serious and sincere investigation of what we find beautiful and why."