SANTA MONICA

British Pop artist Allen Jones hasn’t shown his art here in several years, but his fetishistic images of shapely legs and spike heels are firmly fixed in memory. He has represented the cheerfully kinky side of Pop, in contrast to his ironic American counterparts.

Suddenly faced with a new batch of Jones’ paintings, it’s hard to judge whether he has mellowed or values have slipped so drastically that he simply presents one more example of yesterday’s kink turning into today’s innocence. He still paints curvaceous women seductively dressed in skin-tight evening gowns, leotards--and of course high heels--but the work has a sweetly old-fashioned tone. These paintings are rather like overheated Fred Astaire movies seen through psychedelic glasses. In Jones’ piano bars, cabarets and cocktail parties, everyone is happily soused, loving it up, dancing or singing. Often using a collage-like style, he paints these harmless orgies in hot color, forcing some edges of fragmented figures and letting others ease off into soft suggestions.

Three tiny paintings narrow their focus to dancing couples, while two large canvases wittily reconsider girl-watching. A drop-dead beauty appears in a blaze of light, causing a man to turn into a question mark in “Declaration” and to sprout a wicked alter ego who laughs uproariously in “Temptation.” Both are terrific images that would be nothing more than cartoons if they didn’t say so much about body language.

The only work to cast a pall on the party is an untitled triptych picturing three nudes in an apocalyptic outdoor setting. Here Jones switches his palette from Day-Glo to red and black, slows action to a standstill and separates the sexes. Two women loll suggestively on one side of a bare red tree while the man sits listening to a radio on the other. One of the women is a luminous sex goddess; the other figures seem burned-out shells or hollow memories. One painting isn’t enough to prove that Jones is becoming a moralist, but this work certainly brings him into the disenchanted ‘80s. (James Corcoran Gallery, 1327 5th St., to March 5.)