LONG BEACH

Take the visceral horror of Andy Wilf’s paintings, filter through a comic-book sensibility nurtured by television and media overdose, add equal doses of irony and bombast and you have “It’s All Greek to Me,” Frank Dixon’s current exhibit. The Orange County artist is gaining a reputation for large, expressionistic canvases that attempt to cut through the veneer of civilization to reveal the darker “truths” within.

Dixon’s primary target is bourgeois smugness, where historical mores and emotional depth are eschewed in favor of superficial self-indulgence, fueled by conspicuous consumption and immediate gratification. This is hardly an original premise, and Dixon’s deliberate attempts to confront and to shock tend to come across as mere sensationalism, overwrought dogma disguised as complex social commentary. Dixon’s heavy-handed renderings of a coke-snorting Pinnochio, the Pieta as a Third World sexual icon and the Statue of Liberty drowning in a sea of pollution are obvious metaphors for corrupted innocence, lacking any resonance beyond simplistic satire.

This lack of conceptual depth is reinforced by Dixon’s loose, gestural painting style, in which assertive primary colors and frontal composition replace nuance and subtlety with bang-them-over-the-head sloganeering. Rather than critique the mindless image factory of the mass media by advocating its antithesis, Dixon simply repeats its worst indulgences. In short, the work is too ego-centric for reasoned analysis, too emotionally distanced to succeed as an honest, gut-wrenching statement. (Works Gallery, 2740 E. Broadway Blvd., to July 12.)