SANTA MONICA

Jim Morphesis is one of those rare artists who can sing the same song over and over, yet always make it sound subtly different. His numerous recent skull and torso paintings on wood and paper are individual explorations of the tactile richness of swiped and barnacled paint and miscellaneous humble materials. At the same time, these works are heroic attempts to locate the elusive nature of corporeality and the corrosion of death.

The lushly painted male torso paintings are ripest when the connection between a head and a shoulder is left unstated; when ragged channels of wood gnawed with a chain saw don’t follow a body contour. The pasty-white skull paintings with black cavities offer a surprising range of possibilities: clown, idiot, sad sack, startled witness. But the most powerful and ambitious pieces are those that drag with them a baggage of battered objects (“Skull and Red Door”) or scrap wood. In “Aftermath,” tarry deposits, wood shavings, furry strips of torn paper and rags shoved into cracks between stacked-up beams are metaphors for the butt end of life, glimpsed also in the fragments of bodies emerging from a sooty, gouged-out darkness. That Morphesis can pull this off without a hint of bombast is absolutely stunning. (Tortue Gallery, 2917 Santa Monica Blvd., to Nov. 14.)