ART REVIEWS : Kitsch From the Dark Side at La Luz de Jesus

Summer art exhibits can offer a chance to take a breather from the sometimes forced, sophisticated hard sell of the regular season. For those who appreciate a lighter touch and a dash of humor, as well as punchy imagery, the bubbling SoHo ambience of La Luz de Jesus Gallery offers some welcome refreshment.

Paul Mavrides’ comic book-based paintings have a weird tongue-in-cheek nastiness. The paintings go in too many directions to seem cohesive, romping merrily between vivid, cartoonlike dinosaurs and a futuristic, alien “Cover Girl” created for trendy Tokyo billboards. Yet behind the comic playfulness lurks an angry and incisive wit that aims point-blank at cultural disasters.

Mavrides is most on target with a series of paintings done on that most kitschy of materials--black velvet. Glowing, garish colors catch something of the unforgettable shock in such scenes as bodies stacked beside a tub of poisoned Jonestown Kool-Aid and Jackie Kennedy trying to crawl out of a limo seconds after the President was shot. More subtle but no less appalling is a pile of crack cocaine dressed up by public relations, and Chairman Mao’s portrait repainted with huge, sympathetic doe eyes.

In a concurrent show, Humberto Batista is more fatalistic than angry. His paintings, large hand-colored Xerox-based drawings and assemblage altars find humor and inevitability in the absurdity of life and death. Little found-object statues of saints pay quiet tribute to the capacity to endure with faith, but his paintings are more explicit. Using a grinning skeleton from the Mexican Day of the Dead as a symbolic Everyman--at once alive and dead--Batista unites the dualities of mortality without pain or pathos.

La Luz de Jesus Gallery, 7400 Melrose Ave., to July 29.

Wrapped in an Enigma: Enigmas are mysteries, and a group show of “Enigmatic Messages” promises to be dense and obscure. Surprisingly, however, this gathering of six artists whose work defies explanation has some moments of clarity. Most startling, but hardly enigmatic, are the amassed protest paintings of Manuel Ocampo. Loaded with medieval demons and religious and political symbolism, these crude but powerful panels and assemblages rant passionately against oppression in all its guises. Mary Swanson’s enamel-on-aluminum paintings are less boisterous but more mysterious. Identical in size and shape, the 29 tiny panels have a softly restrained color and meticulous drawing style that absorbs the viewer into contemplating sensuous folds and kinks. That those twisting turns are mostly mechanical--springs, casters and fabricated parts--or, more rarely, soft leaves and flower petals, adds to the delicious sense of unexpected appreciation.

Jeff Long’s oil-stick-on-paper paintings are also appealing. The surface of these multipanel works, with richly colored grounds swept by dark ripples, suggests intriguing networks of chain reaction whose significance seems at once randomly organic and scientific.

Less interesting are Jim Reed’s stage-set-in-a-cube “Masque” constructions that seem like elaborate sitcom dressing rooms, and the mixed-media panels of Christel Dillbohner, with their passel of routine signifiers on thickly painted grounds. John Abrahamson’s panels of oh-so-refined marks and trendy fetishes never even manage to look personal. The pieces of polished driftwood set into niches in the canvas and hung with bits of bone and stone would look wonderful in a decorator’s showroom, but they aren’t so much enigmatic as anemic.

John Thomas Gallery, 602 Colorado Ave., Santa Monica, to July 21.

Encrusted Information: Another group show with a broad theme, “Accretions: Collage and Assemblage,” pulls together pieces by 14 artists for a quick survey of work in these media. A show this packed with work, most of it small, tends to be uneven, and this one is no exception. But some genuinely solid pieces stand out.

As both collage and assemblage are additive processes, “Accretions” takes a dense, layered approach to information gathering and presentation. That density of ideas and emotions is sensed most keenly in Robert Anderson’s small, pink chair, thickly embedded with miniature objects. It’s an organic, throbbing thing, simultaneously alluring and distasteful. Equally thick and writhing are Junko Chodos’ photocollage amalgams. If Chodos carries magazine cut-and-paste obsession to extreme ends, Deborah Lawrence makes the same process less labored yet no less surreal, as her images tie classicism into contemporary life.

Besides offering an encrusted sense of information gathering, collage and assemblage also rejoice in the wealth of materials forever available in a throwaway society. That is felt most potently in Echiko Ohira’s wire- and nail-strewn painted wedges and Kevin Beer’s improbable assemblage objects. Beer’s pieces have a wonderful poetic nonsense about them, as does Tom Stanton’s painted-violin “Olympia” and Sam Lemly’s impossible chair of gum erasers and his “Knot That’s Not Hot” plaque.

Space, 6015 Santa Monica Blvd., to Aug. 4.