La Cienega

Detritus of Culture: Innumerable paintings lumped together with word-puzzle texts and deceased movie-star photos make Andrew Masullo’s art as complicated and self-contradictory as life, personal experience and the art world itself. Along with his own simply lettered “message” paintings, Masullo obsessively displays as his art an eclectic collection of scavenged images, framed and hung meticulously on the walls a la Allan McCollum. This detritus of culture is absorbed pretty much wholesale into his process via the addition of a narrow vertical line of patterning or a block of solid color. Then each piece is dutifully signed and numbered like entries in a crudely efficient mental reference book.

This is not work that explains itself. Repeatedly, words and images bounce off one another, breeding a sketchy kind of mental construct that questions as much as it explains. Alongside tributes to Bette Davis and bright pink enshrined photo enlargements of the artist are mirrors obscured by black painted splotches, literary quotes that breathe with Angst and fancy framed canvasses that dumbly read “Art.” If meaning can be ferreted out of fragmentation by sheer dogged questioning and repositioning, then Masullo has the modern system for information assimilation by the tail. (Asher/Faure, 612 N. Almont Drive, to March 10.)