Santa Monica

Gutsy Nudes: A rounded, abstract female torso has joined Jim Morphesis’ signature iconography of skull and crucified male torso. Less aggressive than earlier paintings but still gutsy, these thickly painted classic forms expound on life and death making repeated nods to their Surrealist and Expressionist roots.

On these female forms, Morphesis’ heavy black drawing line finds constraint. So too does the slashing brushwork that has in the past tried to dissolve the image into a storm of painterly abstract mark. Color on these wood panel paintings is lighter, full of pinks, bright yellows and greens. Pieces of floral wallpaper are collaged into the paint emerging unscathed from beneath areas of scumbled pure color.

The paintings, however, are not mellow. Morphesis’ use of line and the fragmenting of the abstracted female form is incisive, even angry at times. Various figures have gaping red chest cavities exposed above a swollen, pregnant belly which often manages to suggest the brittle roundness of a skull. Other torsos split open into jagged teeth or mutate into weird elongated faces. Surfaces are often rubbed raw of color and slashed so deeply that wads of paper clog the paint. But it is the figure’s bony distortion, reminiscent of Picasso’s fragmentation and Francis Bacon’s sense of the body as meat that makes these images unsettling.

Unfortunately floral patterned wallpaper and bright, garish, color gives the imagery a certain decorative trendiness. It is difficult to understand if the choice of color and material was meant to convey or undermine feminine stereotypes. However, their presence raises a lot of questions that seem superfluous against the power of the painted forms. (Tortue Gallery, 2917 Santa Monica Blvd., to March 17.)