Venice

Frank Stella’s most recent prints, “The Waves,” are tours de force of printmaking and other techniques layered on top of each other in extravagant patterns. Silkscreen, linoleum block, lithography, photographic transfer, hand-coloring, collages of hand-cut papers--these big works toss everything together with bravura abandon.

Baroque in a way that prints normally don’t have permission to be, these combine rich marbling, Tanguy-like liquid curves, geometric figures, streaks and speckles and (in “A Squeeze of the Hand”) a concentric biomorphic form that perversely reminded this viewer of Marc Pally’s fecund creations. Stella’s reference point is “Moby Dick,” a suitably dense and ambitious tome for such excursions into voluminous excess.

Among prints from earlier series of the ‘80s are sheets from “Had Gadya”--inspired by Russia Constructivist El Lissitzky’s designs for a group of Yiddish nursery rhymes--which contain repeated images of cones and cylinders built from logo-like thick and thin lines.

Lee Jaffe, who lives in Venice but is well-acquainted--as a reggae producer--with Jamaica, has produced an uneven but nonetheless oddly compelling body of recent work. Sometimes oblique, sometimes direct, the themes suggested by these constructions and painting are meditations about domination, typecasting, inertia and absurdity under the (usually) calm skies of the Caribbean.

A “found” tin shack reassembled on these shores houses a decorative blackamoor from whose chest radiates a cluster of rods holding miniature TV monitors playing illegible scenes from “Birth of a Nation.” A huge encaustic painting of a red sky and low-lying dark hills is punctuated by a revolving pink cluster of dentures lumped together in fruitless, disembodied chatter.

More puzzling are a series of seven chunky sections of tree trunks notched by anonymous craftsmen for use on boats. Jaffe places neon tubes behind them and perches them on tall steel bases. Is this to be seen as an unsavory, “boutique” appropriation of Third World products? It’s hard to say. (L. A. Louver, 55 N. Venice Blvd. and 77 Market St., to Oct. 8.)