LA CIENEGA AREA

The name of the school French painter Francois Boisrond is connected with is Figuration Libre. That must be French for Neo-Expressionist Graffiti. Like Keith Haring and the rest of that irreverent, hip crowd, Boisrond makes TV-generation art; it’s flashy, splashy, trashy stuff with references that are all over the map.

Rendered in bright, primary colors on unstretched canvas, Boisrond’s compositions frequently center on a slightly primitive-looking head targeted dead center on the canvas, which tends to be broken down into compartments. Surrounded by cars zooming along highways and jumbled, crowded skylines, the floating head surveys the adjoining chaotic compartments with a mournful expression. Boisrond draws with the zest a child brings to his first coloring book and these hysterical pictures kick up an audible visual din.

A gallery press release describes the work as addressing “vulgar products and the cult of bad taste.” Composer Brian Eno once made the observation that in acknowledging the negative aspect of society, one manufactures more of it; smarty-pants artists may adopt an ironic tone when they speak visual slang, but that doesn’t change the fact that they’re using a debased language.

Boisrond’s work is a textbook illustration of one of the international avant-garde styles that have struck the current fancy of the money-changers. This denatured pop art is so homogenized that it means next to nothing; all it really says is that all over the world a certain faction of society reads the same magazines. (Davies Long Gallery, 9006 Melrose Ave., to Jan. 9.)