WILSHIRE CENTER

Highly touted as Ireland’s leading Expressionist painter, Patrick Graham works in a fragmented, almost diaristic style, confronting personal demons like a painterly Eugene O’Neill. “Expressionist” is a misleading label, however, largely because Graham’s often bitter war with himself is paralleled by a contempt for dogma ranging from religion to academicism and aesthetic theory.

This desire to exploit a painful personal history as a catalyst for “spiritual” redemption seems, ironically, to feed on Graham’s Catholic upbringing and early success as a prodigious draftsman at Dublin’s National College of Art. By rejecting the church and the stultifying academicism of “official” art, he proceeded through a series of personal crises that led to an exorcism of his past and a subsequent creative resurrection.

His recent mixed-media works on paper are loosely rendered “collages,” reminiscent at times of Francis Bacon’s anguished figuration and the self-mutilation of Arnulf Rainer. Self-portraits, references to his parents and children, scrawled texts, snapshots of himself or past artworks are arranged in loose hierarchies, resembling either religious icons or pages from a schoolboy’s scrapbook. Each image or phrase seems to be fleeting--literally or symbolically smeared, erased or superseded by a metaphor of equal weight, so that the viewer is left in a state of perpetual visual and semantic flux. As a result, these are often difficult works to grasp or rationalize, leaving us the simple experience of the visceral performance itself--which is, of course, Graham’s exact objective. (Jack Rutberg Fine Arts, 357 N. La Brea Ave., to May 30.)