HOLLYWOOD

Anne Marie Karlsen’s paintings and collages straddle a thin line between modernism, with its focus on form, color, shape and geometry, and post-modernism, with its desire to reveal the structural deceits of the same. This can be dangerous territory, largely because the work can become bogged down in tortuous exercises in art rhetoric while missing the whole point of the exercise: to create work that transcends its own formal and subjective limitations.

Karlsen attacks this problem by grounding her work in the ambiguous territory of cubistic space. Each painting is anchored by a single or double spiraling vortex that seems to be turning itself inside out, an appropriate metaphor for the task at hand. This central image is surrounded by several, often overlapping and tilted rectangular frames. Each picture is made up of Abstract Expressionist daubs of paint and collaged found photographs, so that the depth of the picture plane, with its connotations of surface and texture, is confused by the dislocated and purely theatrical mise en scene of each photograph.

These basic structural boundaries are further complicated by Karlsen’s often contradictory juxtapositions of visual information. The microscopic biological world is contrasted to the macroscopic universe, mechanical reproduction vies with the pure gesture of paint, nature clashes with high tech, advertising imagery with the recreational “purity” of National Geographic. Each work thus appears to refuse to gel either conceptually or spatially.

Yet when taken as a whole, the exhibit falls into an easy repetitiousness that borders on the formulaic. Karlsen has discovered a flexible set of parameters that allow her to indulge her ironic sleights of hand without really offering us anything beyond clever pictorial facility. Once we analyze the premise and digest the content, there’s little left to take home but admiration for process. (Newspace, 5241 Melrose Ave., to Oct. 11.)