Santa Monica

R. Lee White’s exhibition, “Painted Words,” has arrived at a new gallery after touring America and Europe. The narrative series of paintings and drawings, done in 1983-84, is based on the American Indian legend of Crazy Horse but embraces an encyclopedia array of symbolism and references to other cultures and Eastern religions.

White, who lives in Santa Fe and is part Indian, tells the story of Crazy Horse as a Christ-like messiah embroiled in a classic struggle between good and evil. Using a painterly version of a pictographic style, he depicts figures in profile on spattered, rock-like surfaces, often overlaying ghostly images of “spirits” with more solid figures. Simple though they may appear, these paintings are loaded with meanings in the form of numbers, colors and body language. The uninitiated will need assistance to decode them, and White’s trans-cultural imagery is sometimes too densely layered for its own good. Still, this is an unusually ambitious, often engaging effort to place a slice of folklore in a universal context. (Natoli-Ross Gallery, 2110 Broadway, to Oct. 8.)