LA CIENEGA AREA

Lari Pittman’s recent paintings look like abstract fantasies floating across closed eyeballs while making love--probably alone--on a ‘50s rattan couch. It’s covered in one of those bold, tropical silk-screened fabrics, and Sascha Brastoff ashtrays are on the coffee table.

Pittman’s large paintings and works on paper are epic in scale and microscopic in concentration, but so complex as to defy clear reading. They burble with patterns ranging from dry-brushed gourds to cobwebby leaves and arabesque drawing so delicate it recalls Persian miniatures. There are serial rows of rectangles that ruminate on elegant folds and orifices, and a blue silhouette of a penis that is tiny but so insistent as to act as a leitmotif.

Pictures like “Reason to Rebuild” and “Instinct to Live” burst with visual babble about everything from art history and metaphysics to popular culture and humor. Their intensity is so convoluted that their optimistic message about stylishness and fecundity takes on an edge of agonized incoherence. (Rosamund Felsen Gallery, 669 N. La Cienega Blvd., to March 14.)