LA CIENEGA AREA

Zak Zaikine’s painted metal sculptures take the form of psychological icons, attempting to transform comic-book heroes, movie starlets and art historical personalities into Jungian archetypes. Using bright primary colors in a faux naif style, this Woodstock-based artist creates flat, free-standing and wall pieces that appropriate and distort the imagery of the mass media and art Establishment. Zaikine’s cartoonlike humor is highly reminiscent of Red Grooms, but unlike Grooms he tends to opt for banal subject matter and the unsubtle irony of gender bending. Thus an unrecognizable Marilyn Monroe is metamorphosed into a nude Amazon, Popeye into a transsexual, while a Picasso self-portrait stands back to back with that of Gertrude Stein. Like many artists who attempt to fuse the vocabularies of painting and sculpture, Zaikine ends up short-changing both, producing lurid, garish cut-outs that vacillate between the cute and the overbearing. (J. Darraby Gallery, 8214 Melrose Ave., ends today.)