Wilshire Center

James Mathers’ canvases are crowded with wet, weirdly lush abstract views of bulbous cells, viscera and a matrix of hot yellow and orange bone marrow. Titles like “White Cells Neutralizing Free Radicals” (free radicals are nasty little molecules thought to cause aging), “Deteriorating Helix” or “Coagulation” suggest an almost clinical obsession with bodily degeneration. In fact, in a small scrawled and framed statement hanging in the gallery, Mathers lumps biological, social and ecological decay into one inevitable, looming whole, and these works read like autotherapeutic struggles to deal with this scary if accurate ontological view.

In “Coagulation,” white cotton-ball blood cells edged by iridescent blue generate gooey connective fibers. In the two-paneled “Seratonin” (a substance that carries impulses between brain cells), one side depicts the brain’s convoluted gray matter, the other transforms the brain into a dark royal blue haze with incandescent sparks representing the electrical circuitry that dictates both higher thought and forms of insanity. In the very powerful “Ritalin” (a drug that controls hyperactivity), a thick branching neuron is trapped in a restrictive blue spiral. Knowing what titles refer to only enhances the impact of these uncomfortably strong works, but you don’t have to read “Gray’s Anatomy” to feel their pained urgency. (Turske and Whitney Gallery, 962 N. La Brea Ave., to April 23.)