La Cienega Area

Marc Pally has become the master of a fiendishly difficult self-created style of painting that makes great savory stews out of incompatible ingredients. Simmering and bobbling together in a single canvas are obsessively detailed patterns and large gestural areas, semi-recognizable organic forms and convoluted geometries. Created with numerous types of paint and ink, color variously drifts, drips, blurs, whitens or asserts itself with crisp contours.

Pally’s latest work often involves a mating of two abutting but disjunctive surfaces: a stretched canvas and a framed painting on paper. Forms on one surface sometimes extend, with a few sea-changes, into the second portion of the work, as in “He Felt He Had Integrated What He Thought He Had Experienced.” Mixed into the broth of this twin-set are small terra-cotta puzzle pieces, a delicate web of gray and white spills, a floating congeries of cell-like forms in crinkly black line, a cluster of orange lozenges and a neighborly deep green wash.

Although the show is called “He Won’t Budge,” Pally seems to be evolving into more grandly and overtly decorative approaches in his large paintings, like the colorful Deco-y curves and fat white geometric shapes in “He Believed He Understood what He Might See.”

At first look, Pally also appears to be easing the visual stress accompanying his everything-into-the pot style in favor of a greater elegance and calm. But new readings may have as much to do with being exposed long enough to his style to accept its stubbornly knobby difficulties as a strangely beautiful new language. (Rosamund Felsen, 669 N. La Cienega Blvd., to May 28.)