Santa Monica

In the numbed nihilism of much post-modern art, the nearly hysterical pitch of “Irwin,” a collaborative of five Yugoslavian artists, is a welcome if weird breath. These fellows met in mandatory military service and decided to spearhead a new art that “zealously affirmed” Yugoslavian and particularly Slovenian culture, including critical aspects of its social identity like its resistance to the Nazis and Stalin.

As for art, Irwin distrusts today’s fashionable eclecticism and vows that the observer should never have to mistake “plastic wrapping for art, a copy for an original” again. The artists believe in a monumental and collaborative art that “shapes permanent, heroic values.” Whew! If these guys are serious they must be exhausted.

Irwin stormed the art scene when the members postered Venice with blurbs on their art at the 1986 Biennale. They’ve now been welcomed into the international arena where their arcane jargon and manifestoes get tons of play.

Works are heavy and dark, framed in ornately carved charred wood or actual hardened tar. They incorporate other mixed media like a bloodied shirt, lots of deer antlers and moving parts. Each artist puts down imagery that the next one elaborates on, making a feverish melange of sources far flung as Renaissance madonnas, political caricature, Courbet’s lumpy realism.

When the dust settles, what’s left are very intense, fresh dioramas conveying (with the power of a sledge hammer) a closeness through toil with the land, a tidy homeland of orderly cottages and roaming wild life and stalwart, fiercely independent fellows whose zeal threatens to erupt into a fascism of its own brand at any moment.

Also shown are mixed-media works by Ned Evans. Like someone whispering politely at a riot, Evans’ mostly painted wood works are lost in Irwin’s cacophony. “Pichis” washes a green film on two lateral wood panels while the central panel is green pinstripe fabric painted a drippy translucent red. Only the impressive “Como” really solidly holds our attention, but Evans still shines in his tiny postcard collages that feature paint-smudged photos of architecture, penguins or pedestrians nestled in neat geometries. (Maloney Gallery, 910 Colorado Ave., to Dec. 22.)