DOWNTOWN

Debra Vodhanel’s figurative watercolors are a strange combination of art historical appropriation and risky experimentation. Her work is rooted in chance and accident, a sort of painterly Rorschach Test where figures and forms suggest themselves from clouds and blotches of color and are then developed according to the strict parameters of classical models and series. The results are either muddy or limpid “portraits,” single or doppelganger motifs that appear to be metamorphosing into ethereal landscapes or tactile topographies.

Vodhanel’s undoing is her inability to create an individual visual vocabulary divorced from her historical sources. A combination of Picasso’s multiple perspective, De Kooning’s muscular expressionism and Chagall’s wispy, mythological romanticism might have made for a provocative, Post-Modernist hybrid. Yet in Vodhanel’s hands these blatantly contradictory elements merely stand as overworked cliches, smothered by sentimentality and, despite pretentions to free association, stifling mannerism. (James Turcotte Gallery, 3517 W. Sixth St., to March 1.)