WILSHIRE CENTER

Bobby Ross’ meticulously detailed paintings are so overloaded with visual information that they induce a state of mental vertigo, producing what philosopher Jean Baudrillard calls the “obscene delirium of communication.” Ross mitigates this sense of media overload by placing his “high-tech” morality plays within literal and metaphorical theatrical frameworks, extracting a loose narrative reading from even the densest tangle of information.

The results resemble a cross between medieval illuminated manuscripts, computerized pattern painting and Jess’ “paste-ups,” with Ross himself acting as either the culpable trickster or myopic aesthetic provocateur. Thus in “The Power and the Glory,” Ross’ self-portrait turns his back on a theatrical mise en scene , where top-hatted stick figures dance a Busby Berkeley number with grenades and Uzis as props, napalm fires blazing in the background. The stage floor itself is stained by a large pool of blood, an ominous counterpoint to the proscenium’s glitzy embellishments and seductive dollar signs.

His destabilizing of painterly “integrity” through banal kitsch and historical reference is perhaps intended to mirror society’s tendency to turn its worst abuses into the emptiest of spectacle. Just as historical consciousness is sacrificed to the exigencies of the present, so real “meaning” is replaced by the rhetoric of painterly bravura. This is all well and good as a critique of post-industrial society’s more alienating tendencies, but one wonders whether Ross is not copping out by refusing to suggest ways out of the informational impasse. For all their didacticism and visual energy, these works are remarkably passive as political statements. (Ovsey Gallery, 126 N. La Brea Ave., to March 14.)