BEVERLY HILLS

Jamy Kahn describes his work as “making allusions to the ever present pull between the forces of dark and light,” but a cursory glance at his lollipops and rainbows paintings suggests that Kahn favors the sunny side of the psyche. If Sister Corita Kent jumped on the New Wave bandwagon she might turn out paintings resembling Kahn’s.

Working with acrylic or mixed media on paper or canvas, Kahn fashions bright, brushy pictures with a slick graphic quality evocative of Jim Dine. Kahn’s vocabulary of recurring symbols also brings Dine to mind; he’s big on hearts, along with pyramid shapes, Xs and spheres. So far so good, but Kahn never quite manages to bring his central theme into focus, perhaps because his sense of composition is rather muddled.

He almost pulls it off in a series of drawings wherein a long sheet of paper is divided into squares housing unrelated images: a small abstraction next to an image of a coffee cup next to an image of a ringed planet, for example. Kahn rummages further through the Modernist bag of tricks in large paintings that find objects--a child’s toy bow (sans arrow), brightly painted wooden discs--affixed to the surface of the canvas. Kahn’s intentions are interesting enough and his pictures make for stylish decorations, but he has yet to infuse them with the power of the idea that he intends to express. (Stella Polaris Gallery, 445 S. Beverly Drive, to Oct. 3.)