Hollywood

Sci-fi universes rendered with the manic brush of a new-wave Kandinsky are the stuff of Ken Hurbert’s recent paintings. He fancies rushing arcs and hurtling cones, wiggling flames and winking comic-book-style “sparkle” marks. But Hurbert also has a good eye for color and inventive shape, and a sense of how to navigate between static imagery and whooshing movement. As long as things don’t get too dizzyingly busy, he seems to be on to a good thing.

In “Monopoly,” a bird-like head pops out of a star-shaped object (a space station?) against a painterly orange maybe-this-is-Mars background. An untitled painting looks like the edge of some obscure purple, white and yellow solar system hung with soft little rectangles, speeding arcs and a star with a bare-canvas center tweaked with dry black traces of paint. “Preparation” looks down on triangular objects leaved like books that poke out of central yellow-orange circle.

Bundled orange rods loom into view in “Climate Control,” which mixes up mossy-green landscape with dense clouds and flames into a weird stew of transplanted locations. The row of identical beach balls running up the side of this painting strikes a false note, however, as if the artist felt he needed justification from a more outwardly ironic school of painting. A trio of small etchings in the same style makes it clear that the nifty novelty of Hurbert’s style has everything to do with scale and color and the handling of paint. (Newspace, 5241 Melrose Ave., to April 8.)