The Valley

Big business seems to be into society’s new religion. Religion itself has taken to mimicking entertainment. The situation gets a barbed drubbing in Michael Hickman’s newest paintings. In these quick, thin works, power lunches have the reverent illumination of the Last Supper, and the Crucifixion is strangely updated theater complete with colored Malibu lighting and a dying Christ in a business suit.

Hickman’s chiaroscuro technique of strong, contrasting darks and lights is bluntly direct. Scenes have the gritty reality of newspaper reproduction mixed with a quirky what’s-wrong-with-this-picture kind of disjunction. Whether it’s the apparent torture victim with a trash can hood in “Performance” or the placid gospel reader surrounded by guards carrying semiautomatic weapons in “The Word,” every drama goes strange.

Hickman’s figures are rudimentary and the often garish color gives them a heightened urgency. They need that emotional push to withstand the volume-killing glazes he uses to pull the compositions together. Yet the raw color alone can be too blatant, as in hellish scenes of body builders and punk rockers. Hickman seems more effectively controlled in the mysterious grayed images that tangle the symbolic vocabularies of the sacred and the profane. (Orlando Gallery, 14553 Ventura Blvd., Sherman Oaks, to April 28.)