Pasadena

Just when you thought Frank Romero had made all the vintage cars and painted all the curios he possibly could, he paints more. And they’re still good.

On view are monotypes, sculptures and paintings that exude humor, street savvy, passion and technical acumen. Two delightfully silly wall-hung lowriders are cut out of polished aluminum. From one, a skeletal old hag draws her cupid’s bow; on the hood of the other, a buxom nude squats most unceremoniously. It’s fun to consider the prospect of these two cruising Whittier Boulevard some balmy Saturday night.

What’s good about Romero and many of the Latinos now surveyed at the County Museum of Art is that they make culture-sensitive art but stay open to art’s formal roots. You can see this in a series of reclining nudes, some abstracted to a few telling smudges, others--such as the lush oil “Maja Desnuda”--carefully and classically composed. In these, Romero casts an eye to the whole genre of traditional Western painting and shows that however primitive, cute or social your art, you’d better know how to draw and paint, and he does.

That he is a painter’s painter comes through in several small still lifes of tables covered with intricately patterned Mexican textiles and curios. Where broad swaths of color congeal to form bone and body in the nudes in these paintings, material reality disintegrates into a mosaic of strategically placed hues. Dramatic paint handling, expressive light, good-natured satire and political consciousness join in “Teatro Campesino.” (Lizardi/Harp Gallery, 290 W. Colorado Blvd., to Feb. 24.)