Wilshire Center

Joe Fay’s combed color splotches have gone soft pastel. The color switch, coupled with his trademark cookie cutter silhouettes of cowboys, coyotes, leaping trout and bears makes for a weird, urban-sportsman’s panache. It may be a move designed to confound intellectuals who like their art to look deadly serious, but it also knocks the pins from under pieces like “Bear and Bull Meadow” that try to a comment on the predator-prey relationship of survival.

Fay’s mood here is overwhelmingly exultant. It’s so up-beat we’re unsure whether he’s praising or parodying the city slicker who spends holidays as an “environmentalist” trapper, hunter, or fisherman. Confusion reads like irresolution, which is too bad. Irony is a terrible thing to waste.

Carm Goode’s new, tiny expressionistic landscapes are dense, intensely conceptual paintings. As images they are juicy paintings of land and sea that play on the American landscape tradition, finding spiritual analogies in the beauty and desolation of nature. Explosions at sea, armored islands and hovering monoliths over figurative mesas suggest unsettling scenarios exuding a forbidding, philosophic fatalism.

The titles, with their paragraph-long explanatory notes, put all that into technical terms. The text links the paintings to Rupert Sheldrake’s radical theory of genetic memory, detailed definitions of form and fragments of Greek mythology. This complex content demands a great deal from the viewer. The payoff is something of a gut-level understanding of evolution as a self propelled act of God. Art used to expound theory is always in danger of being tagged illustrative or simply dull. Goode’s paintings aren’t dull, but they could never get all the philosophy across without the text. And that’s where the ideas get piled so high they become didactic. (Jan Baum Gallery, 170 S. La Brea Ave., to Oct.28)