La Cienega Area

With the zest of a crazed botanist set loose in a garden full of vintage typography and ornamental designs, Lari Pittman plots out eccentric and intricate visual systems. All his big new paintings on mahogany panels affirm the chain of life, the botanical and biological surge of activity that keeps the planet buzzing. Plant imagery proliferates here and Pittman frequently incorporates double-oval images suggestive of mitosis and mock flow-chart forms suggesting Mendelian law.

His grand-slam piece is “How sweet the day, after this and that. Deep sleep is truly welcomed.” Hole-punch scrolling runs across the top, rows of white ovals contain silhouetted portraits of assorted people, fat air-flow arrows whoosh upward, the word “what” repeats in a nervous stutter, question marks twinkle in irises and goofy three-dimensional frames encircle calligraphic birds and a flower. The overwhelmingly ‘50s design vernacular--including a Montmartre-style city view--sweeps the eye busily along the entire 16-foot swath.

In “The sounds of belief, to an atheist, are very touching,” lanterns and owl-eyes form a kind of neo-Rosicrucian symbol, emitting flat bands of green and orange rays; a drizzle of tiny fine white dots sketches concentric planetary orbits and plant life settles everywhere--on the surface of a balloon, on a towel draped over a dusting mop, in tiny ornamental feather licks, in a series of spikey images running along one edge of the piece like a film strip.

Fecund, virtuosic, mad in an deceptively methodical way, these and other paintings by Pittman deliberately combine the look of pure design with the look of scientific analysis--perhaps in order to make the point that each adheres to a stylized system of its own. (Rosamund Felsen Gallery, 669 N. La Cienega Blvd., to Feb. 4.)