La Cienega Area

We’ve known Marc Pally as the creator of lush, teeming universes of deliberately disjunctive organic forms. Now it appears he also can be a devil-may-care provocateur. If this new approach lacks the romantic near-chaos of Pally’s previous work, it still has a raffish appeal. In “Group Show,” for example, a wall of 58 small oval and rectangular paintings recycle ‘80s sayings (“slow growth”), allude to subjects in the news (“junk bonds”) and quote adspeak (“early-bird special”).

Day-Glo and eccentric colors, busy patterns, goopy textures and various styles of lettering keep everything puttering along. But the joke is the way the visual-aural static nearly overwhelms allusions to a famous art critic and a couple of artists.

In still other works, like “Weak Link,” Pally adds painted words-- vile data, cash flow, zero gain --to his language of images. The words give the paintings a new stridency and pointed social relevance, threatening to destroy the delicate ecological balance of the imagery. But Pally has taught us how to intuit seeming disarray and imbalance as a map of the mind’s wanderings. Given the context, the angular metallic designs in “Weak Link” read as ornaments produced by an ancient civilization; white dots on black leaf forms suggest that mold may be setting in now.

With the exception of a disappointing experiment--silver paintings textured with bumpy vegetative forms and celestial bursts--the remainder of the exhibit shows Pally in firm control, a painterly Prospero commanding the spirits of his rich and strange visual territory. (Rosamund Felsen, 669 N. La Cienega Blvd., to Oct. 7.)