SANTA MONICA

Two artists in their mid-30s still grapple with the cosmic question, “How much is enough?” Seven oversize paintings by James Hansen seem to decide that no amount is too much. He makes jigsaw abstractions of scrappy shapes painted in patterns ranging from polka-dot to snake skin and fire-sale-at-the-yardage-store. Their visual assault makes old Op Art bland by comparison. Ouch, my eyes!

Hansen is an East Coast artist showing here for the first time. He is not content to blast our optic nerve with patterns. The shapes have to be painted illusionistically so they look like three-D thingies floating in shallow space. Psychedelic, man.

Still not content, the artist manages to weave in references to past modernist art, including everyone from Picasso’s colored collage Cubism to Jackson Pollock’s field paintings. The work is not without interest. Not the least of which is the way it manages to remain insistently lower class. It looks innocent and scruffy like the work of a subway graffiti writer who spent six months at the Cortauld Institute. If you can resist the work’s wise-guy cleverness, it is fun to look at. All the same, we are justly leery of art this complicated. It is like a word-salad monologue where the listener has to make up his own conversation.

James Brown seems to say that very little will do. He shows a gaggle of white-on-black woodcuts. They are portrait heads that meander off from naive skin-head punks in Neo-Ex style to ever-busier Picasso-style variations. It may not be true that any of several thousand graduate art students could have done them. (Moloney Gallery, 910 Colorado Blvd., to May 16.)