Santa Monica

Being Billy Al Bengston means never having to say you’re sorry. You start out doing really neat stuff like “Godzilla’s Saddle” (1962), a lacquered-up masonite painting with a bunch of chevrons tucked inside a bright red propeller-like shape that’s nosed down on a big, plush, soft-edged purple circle. All around it is a lovely sweep of turquoise with blurry orange dots. Ooo-eee! It’s dreamy and slick and kinda goofy all at once.

Then you get interested in beating on spray-painted sheets of aluminum to make “dentos” like “Somewhere in Sonora” (1969). People look at these lustrous, bashed-in things and think, “Car culture! Light effects!” They also think: “This guy is great at titles.”

After that you get fixated on the shape of an iris you find on a sugar packet. Maybe you think this will be what the beer can was to Jasper Johns. So you strew it hither and yon during the ‘70s, at first soberly tucking it into the center of paintings and then just enjoying it as a friendly logo for you to roll those dreamy colors around. You do watercolors and paintings and screens, and who cares if people call it “decoration.”

Well, maybe you do, just a teeny bit. So in the ‘80s you try to get meaningful, and you do canvases like “Lodi” (1988), with thin red bars framing a big red planet with soft orbit-tracks on a green-yellow-black background. It’s trying to be cosmic, sure, but it’s really about color and the same sort of easygoing prettiness that was always your siren song. (James Corcoran Gallery, 1327 5th St., Santa Monica, to Dec. 31.)