La Cienega

Acclaimed black artist Robert Colescott’s cartoony figuration challenges stereotypes that enthrone white Western European culture and art. Over the years Colescott’s paintings have included huge crimson-lipped Aunt Jamima gals (sometimes in the guise of De Kooning’s “Woman”) and clownish, passive black men interacting with self-satisfied, often dominant whites. The formula could come under fire as the sort of intra-racial spoofing that perpetuates rather than queries racism.

New paintings confirm that Colescott consciously manipulates burlesque to lay bare our sneakiest hypocrisies, showing that these come in all colors and both sexes. In “Star,” a “Dynasty” version of power--chicks, exotic cars, champagne served by servile white waiters--engulfs a winsome black youth. Beside a tiny rainbow there’s the veritable pot, but Colescott fills it with shackles, not gold. Imagery includes books hovering over weary black laborers to suggest intellect wasted by social constraints, or pensive black women relegated to the periphery of compositions while their mates woo flaxen-haired bimbos. There’s nothing subtle here; we see every rough, sloshy stroke, colors bite, surfaces churn, caricatures are in high relief. Some may find Colescott’s pictorial and symbolic accessibility dangerously cliche, but it’s just this unabridged directness that wins us.

New Yorker Peter Dean is a self-avowed Expressionist who says he survived hard edge and Pop art by selling works to neighbors. Dean’s zany landscapes and scenes of murderous or erotic mayhem crafted from inch-thick Cool Whip peaks of jarring color get nationwide attention now. In this show, clusters of flowers modeled from thick, orbiting pigment are set against macabre knickknacks. Dean kneads blood-red blossoms, devils’ masks, ceramic snakes, mounted boar heads and primitive figurines into one manic, weirdly appealing whole. (Koplin Gallery, 8225 1/2 Santa Monica Blvd., to May 21).