ART REVIEW : James Rosenquist’s Placid Pictures : Eight recent works by the Pop painter who once smashed conventions are at Pasadena’s Art Center College of Design.

James Rosenquist’s achievement as an artist in the early 1960s was one of formal transposition. In brash yet oddly dreamy canvases, the public and commercial nature of outdoor billboard painting was brought into the ostensibly private and non-commercial province of “high art.” As with the work of other Pop painters, Rosenquist’s maneuver dramatically changed the prevailing terms with which art would henceforth be conceived. Pious conventions got smashed.

Rosenquist’s aesthetic played off the fully modern experience of being a rather helpless speck embedded within an overwhelming landscape of Gargantuan images. Applied to the monumental scale of Abstract Expressionist canvases, the techniques typically used for the even more monumental scale of commercial billboards yielded visual tropes never before seen in painting. Brought to a climax in his 1965 wrap-around painting, “F-111,” they could be disarming.

Allusions to billboard imagery had been around for a long time (at least since the paintings of Stuart Davis). Rosenquist’s appropriation of actual billboard technique, however, which he combined with abrupt juxtapositions of disparate images that keyed right into the mundane Surrealism common to commercial art, made for some of the most compelling pictures of the early 1960s.

The effect was more than simple novelty, although novelty’s seductive charms are not to be casually dismissed. Yet it also made for a rather narrow achievement, as formal innovations so often do. For once the dramatic transposition had occurred, the pictorial content needed to carry the paintings. Unfortunately, it rarely has.

A small show of recent, mostly large works at the Williamson Gallery at Pasadena’s Art Center College of Design suggests how placid Rosenquist’s content has gotten. The seven multi-panel paintings and one single panel painting, all dating from 1988 to 1992, employ traditional American themes in a brand of painterly syntax that came to the fore during the 1980s, and which Rosenquist has adapted to his art.

The paintings could be divided into two groups. The five earliest show Rosenquist working with a particular compositional structure, in paintings whose subject is typically the Edenic garden. The three remaining pictures attempt to complicate the mix, turning to expansive evocations of sublime landscape.

The early paintings all employ a rendition of an enlarged photograph of lush or exotic flowers. Woven into the pictures are fragments of female faces.

Most of the paintings appear to have been made from collage-studies, in which jagged pictures cut with scissors from fashion or glamour magazines are arranged on the surface of a floral photograph. The result, when transferred to paint, is an image overlay. The scattered bits of faces can be seen in any of three ways: as behind, in front of, or seamlessly coincident with the surface of the painted flowers.

Suggesting a latter-day Eve floating through our modern image-Garden, with the standard motif of flowers as female sexual organ apparently intended to add an edge, Rosenquist’s paintings reinterpret a conventional motif. The update is accomplished through a technique pioneered by German painter Sigmar Polke, and imported by a younger generation of American artists that includes David Salle. Internationally, the use of image overlays has been ubiquitous in painting since the early 1980s.

The three most recent canvases, which include an enormous, seven-panel, black-and-white picture 35 feet in length, depart the garden of paradise for the sublime frontier of outer space. As pictorial context, the heavens have replaced the heaven-on-Earth of Eden.

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Here, the overlays include constellations of floating pencils, French horns, the dot patterns of an optical exam, origami birds and aircraft. The tools of art, music, perception and liberating flight intermingle.

There is also floating currency, including a large, white, schematic rendering of a penny, painted in a manner that crosses a fingerprint with a topographical map. Abraham Lincoln’s head--a profile of liberty--looks rather like a lunar landing site.

Elsewhere, a scrim of thin screen obscures a sizable portion of one painting. It is pinned in place by more than two dozen arrows plunged, St. Sebastian-like, into the surface of the canvas. With a large hole cut in the center of the screen, revealing the dots of an optical exam, painting is posited as part screen for the projection of images, part target for perception.

The show, which was organized by Williamson Gallery director Stephen Nowlin, has been well selected to demonstrate the explorations of Rosenquist’s art during a concentrated moment. The earliest work, a long, horizontal canvas called “Television, or the Cat’s Cradle Supports the Electronic Picture,” contains almost all the elements that are examined with greater specificity, or with enlarged ambition, in the rest of the show.

The painting also suggests the artist’s vision of his role. Three overlays float through a velvety black galaxy dotted with stars and supernovas: There are fragments of a woman’s face, an eye chart and two enormous, purple, passion flowers. The flowers look for all the world as if they had been painted by someone modeled on the typical, 19th-Century American explorer-artist. Imagine Martin Johnson Heade dispatched to outer space.

Rosenquist’s rebus-like art describes a decidedly Romantic view of a painter’s activity. His pictures don’t get much involved in larger questions of painting’s place in the contemporary scheme of things, and they do suffer for it. If occasionally they even succumb to a hot-house insularity, they nonetheless do what they do with considerable aplomb.

* Williamson Gallery, Art Center College of Design, 1700 Lida St., Pasadena, (818) 584-5144, through May 29. Closed Mondays.