ART REVIEWS

Constricted Weirdness: What do you get when you cross Arshile Gorky with Peter Max? Something, one imagines, like Carroll Dunham’s new paintings.

First, there are the droplets, coils, mounds and pods plucked from the bulging, pneumatic universe of biomorphic abstraction. Then there is the wild, bright, high-funk palette of ‘60s design. Each is seductive in its own right; but--at least here--the mix is less than auspicious.

There is a weird calm to Dunham’s images. Instead of fantasy’s shifting, spinning, polyrhythmic space, we get highly capricious forms nicely outlined in black, neatly silhouetted against a whitewashed backdrop.

More often than not, those forms coalesce to suggest eccentric but benign creatures straight out of science fiction. Take “Group D, 8”--a comic-book portrait of a two-headed beast with thin black whiskers, cloud-like, multicolored organs, and a thick necklace of green olives. The whole is fantastic, but it really isn’t much fun, for it is too tightly controlled, too tightly hemmed in by that fascistic black line.

Question: What do you get when you cross “high” art with pop culture?

Answer: As the curators at MOMA and MOCA know, more trouble than you bargained for. One need only compare Dunham to an artist like Keith Haring, whose work--through its style, content and context--effectively demonstrates the banality of such distinctions.

Dunham, however, is still trapped by them, conscious of working within a tradition of abstract painting, but doubly conscious of the need to renew that tradition’s moribund language.

Dunham seems to know what he wants to do, but he isn’t willing to surrender to the anarchy. Surrender, however, can be sweet--and it may be the only way out of a situation as difficult as this one.

Daniel Weinberg Gallery, 2032 Broadway, Santa Monica, (213) 453-0180, through Oct. 31. Closed Sundays and Mondays.