Wilshire Center

Robert Overby’s large billboard knockoffs sift through layers of Madison Avenue graphic hype like a cut-and-paste primer for marketing the vacuous. Images like “See Robert” bubble with appreciation for firm flesh and neat packaging that equates with style. Yet faint, underpainted images suggesting scenes from blue movies hint at more exploitative sexual underpinnings.

Overby’s exploration of the marketing of desirability focuses on women as objects that sell and are sold. Paintings mimic the slick, airbrushed perfection of magazines and the scale of outdoor signage. Despite chic quickness that encourages first-glance assimilation, many paintings are piles of fragmented imagery cunningly layered so that hidden forms emerge only with longer viewing. One of the most successful of these is “OGUE,” a drippy sandwiching of forms from Vogue magazine beneath a smiling cartoon character of the perfect housewife.

Like trendy advertising, this work jumps all over, giving the show a weird schizophrenia. It nags with a sensation of something sinister, ignored but still viable beneath the stage makeup, Breck-girl smiles and candy temptations. (Jan Baum Gallery, 170 S. La Brea Ave., to Sept. 30.)