LA CIENEGA AREA

If an old dog can’t learn new tricks, does that mean a young dog can’t learn old tricks? Billy Al Bengston is trying to do a bit of each in a new batch of about 30 paintings. To whatever extent Bengston is a bit long in the canine, it never stops his adapting to the fashion of the moment so that it looks like a natural extension of his thought process.

This group mixes bits of Hockney still life with Sam Francis confetti splashes and Neo-Expressionist motifs like the silhouette of a little dog jumping through a hoop. Such pictorial aplomb pulls it all together. We are convinced for the moment that Bengston has always been inspired by tropical flora glimpsed through a window, forgetting that this was once the hip motorcycle racer who painted chevrons on lacquered metal. If that doesn’t seem to matter, it is because by now it is clear that stylishness itself is the real content of Bengston’s art. You get the feeling old Fido will always learn the new turn.

Bengston still has more trouble as a young pup trying to get traditionally housebroken. Oriental art is clearly on his mind in large watercolors making up the bulk of the show. He is thinking about the sumi painters’ rapier-like deftness. In a sheet called “January Watercolor,” he brings it off as well as an Occidental can. In another with the same title, he manages to inhabit the spirit of Gauguin’s hot exoticism. The canine outline suddenly suggests a brooding animal deity.

All too often, however, the wrist is not right for the job and strokes are spontaneous without accuracy or accurate without verve.

Even worse are 10 large acrylic paintings. Bengston was a virtuoso with a spray gun, but he is bust with a brush. The range of effects here goes from flat solid-color shape to labored background blending, in short from A to B. No, there is C: a few impastoes worthy of a woozy sidewalk artist. Large compositions like “Nehemia” and “Moses” compensate with the artist’s great sense of color and pattern but smaller works are glutted and dull. (James Corcoran Gallery, 8223 Santa Monica Blvd., to May 31.)