La Cienega Area

Alexis Rockman’s paintings of dissected rodents, cloven-hoofed lap dogs and bug-eyed frogs ingesting gargantuan, fuzzy black and yellow bees run viewers through a quick series of responses from disgust to wonder to the captivated delight inspired by those exotic New Guinea bugs usually seen under glass. This work is natural history or 19th-Century botanical illustration processed by Rockman’s wild imagination.

In “Rattenfanger,” a buck-toothed mouse has its underbelly pressed to the picture plane, revealing as if by dissection an isolated scarlet heart, entrails and funny reptilian limbs. In “Ganges,” an aquatic creature with a long siphoning snout calmly imbibes a school of exquisitely rendered blue fish.

Rockman’s technique is schooled and perfectly suited to his macabre content. He uses oil like drippy expressionistic watercolor, applying it in shiny glazes and modeling volumetric detail between bleeding edges.

Though Rockman’s synthesized demons lack the deliberately sinister veneer of photographic surrealism, they’re direct and compelling as something a child might conjure up in the dark after seeing a tadpole sprout legs in the school aquarium. “The Object of Desire”--an insect-ridden porcine mole hanging haplessly from a tree limb--shows best that Rockman’s sensibility is perhaps closest to the punning, innocent perversity of Alice’s adventures in “Through the Looking Glass.” We are horrified and beguiled in turn by the homicidal Queen of Hearts and by Rockman’s winged sea squid that makes lunch of a barely visible little man. (Michael Kohn Gallery, 313 N. Robertson Blvd., to April 9.)