Downtown

Smirking Sunflowers: Eric Martin surely could have made a living turning out sneering album-cover designs before the demise of the LP or maybe brash consumer ads with a mocking, ‘50s influence. As it happens, this CalArts grad produces paintings--most recently, 100 at a clip. These small “Sunflower” images are of flowers with faces that smile in slightly different but consistently diabolical or smirking ways.

Martin lugs a cartoonist’s bag of tricks, making his crew variously cross-eyed, wild-eyed, bug-eyed, long-lashed or with orbs blissfully or bashfully closed. There’s a Quaker Oats pilgrim face and an Aunt Jemima face. Some fun-house mirror skinny faces sneak in, in trapezoidal frames.

To be sure, when a group of these brightly colored characters are massed together, their sheer maniacal grin-power generates a kind of ditsy intensity. It’s possible Martin is taking the subject of the Van Gogh painting that generated an astronomical auction price and anthropomorphizing it in cheerfully crass ways in order to make some point about value and meaning and artistic variants and heavy stuff like that. It’s also possible this is simply Martin’s way of amusing himself in lieu of getting serious. (Dennis Anderson Gallery, 1007 Madison, to March 3.)