Venice

In mid-career, New York artist Judith Linhares has molded a cacophony of references into a personal, visionary figurative expressionism. The spectral figuration of artists like Nathan Oliveira hook up with a sensitivity to craft and such forms as Mexican folk art and voodoo in large canvases and expertly tooled small gouaches on paper that are at once cartoony and mythic.

Linhares came of age in the Bay Area during the post-minimal ‘70s when funk assemblage and the influence of feminist art strongly reaffirmed intuition and dreams as art content. To this day, her works seem as if they’re poured fresh out of the artist’s subconscious with little editing. We see strange aquatic environments, mythic stick figures and schematic boats along the lines of Paul Klee but huge in scale. We see thick--trunked native girls with tiki heads and coarse anatomy languishing in lime green forests, emaciated horses tromping through arid wastelands littered with skulls and lovable extra terrestrials with enormous eyes that look like neon doughnuts.

In the fine large canvas, “Deep Water,” stick figure fishermen crouch on incandescent orange boulders lining the banks of a primordial hole where we glimpse comical and carnivorous sea life. In the equally lovely gouache, “She Wolf,” a looming, almost caricatured beast casts a dark brick shadow over the male infants she’s about to suckle.

Whatever her sources, Linhares has carved her own fresh course and makes humane, grand works that manage to be unpostured but technically controlled. (L.A. Louver, 77 Market St., to April 9.)