Hollywood

Two very eccentric previous shows by a young and convincing visionary painter, Peter Zokosky, left us wondering what would come next; Zokosky is his own hard act to follow. The answer is more of the same.

The artist’s creative imagination romps in split-personality fashion over every subject and style from American primitive portraits to sea monsters to a huge four-paneled work that depicts the traditional oriental wave form enlarged and covering some 20 feet of canvas. In the arresting “Serpent” a snake shrouded in the dark, mahogany tones of Old Master art slithers weightless over the glassy surface of an amber lake. We change gears abruptly to a folksy view of a yuppie couple spending a day gardening. Look closer and the work--like “Serpent”--is teaming with sexual and religious symbolism. The woman holds a serpentine hose and waters a single, bare tree while her mate stands idly by. At the bottom of the work, Zokosky paints a Rousseau-ish cross section of the ground so that we see the roots of the Tree of Knowledge flourishing in this contemporary Eden. “Hare,” one of two small canvases hung side by side, depicts a spry animal caught in a mid air leap against naively painted cotton candy clouds. Its partner, “Hare After,” shows the same airborne animal in the same pose, painted in the same primitive style but skinned to its muscle structure. Then there is a brittle little porcelain portrait of a hairless face before an enlarged backdrop of raw meat.

Our Judeo-Christian beliefs about creation and afterlife, culture and the collisions of cultures (“The Death of Bali”), sublime nature (“Gibbons in Trees”), decaying nature, good and evil are all jumbled up in this cosmology where the only constant is change. Another artist stretching himself so thinly in so many exotic directions could fall on his face; Zokosky pulls off his disturbing, mystical vision because he feels it deeply. (Newspace, 5241 Santa Monica Blvd., to Nov. 4.)