Wilshire Center

Parenthetical Pettibon: Raymond Pettibon is the sort of peculiar and enthralling artist that sends you out of the gallery muttering, “Who is this guy, anyway?” His current show, “A Long Parenthesis,” consists of a vast outpouring of cartoon-like small and medium-sized drawings that include brief texts alluding to all sorts of big-ticket ideas in the realms of sex, art, religion, death, philosophy and literature. In the course of Pettibon’s musings, a panoply of famous figures--as diverse as Roy Cohn and George Santayana--make cameo appearances, mostly as disembodied voices.

Sometimes rather jejune, sometimes thrillingly acute, the works speak in many voices: comic-book yelps, poetic reverie, heavy irony, conversational banter, natty epigrams and inscrutable runes. Workaday images conjure up whatever’s necessary: a Romanesque cathedral, a ball player, a torture scene, a dappled landscape, a Gumby toy, human waste, an explosion signifying the beginning (or the end) of the world. Frequently, images are redrawn but paired with completely different ideas. The work is a sort of vest pocket open university, or a laboratory where notions about the world are tested and tossed out. The casual disposability of Pettibon’s pieces of paper--which are neither framed nor matted--attests to the relative unimportance of each one in the larger stream of ideas. (A few are drawn on the wall, another bid for impermanence.)

And yet Pettibon is also a sophisticated version of the little fellow in several of the drawings who hollers an existential “VAVOOM” from his mountain top perch. The artist grabs ideas from here, there and everywhere, creating a niche for himself by virtue of the sheer amplitude of his project and the restlessness of his intellect. “And what is drawing for? And why write well?” he prints on one piece of paper. But he knows, oh yes, he knows. (Richard/Bennett Gallery, 830 N. La Brea Ave., to March 31.)