ART REVIEW : Hyperactive World of Lari Pittman

A three-ring circus of shameless desire and its discharge explodes all over the jam-packed, glitter-sprinkled surfaces of Lari Pittman’s hyperactive paintings. His newest body of work in an ongoing series collectively titled “A Decorated Chronology of Insistence and Resignation” marks a walloping breakthrough for the savvy and talented L.A.-based artist.

The 16 over-the-top, in-your-face pictures at Rosamund Felsen Gallery are the best he’s made in years. Overloaded with more vibrant optical information and pulsating energy than ever before, their supercharged colors are more saturated and their pictorial space is more riddled with contradictory shifts.

Pittman has eliminated the flat, graphic fields of dead color that sometimes suffocated parts of his last group of paintings, working (for the first time) with radiant oil paints. He has keyed up contrasts to a shocking, bowl ‘em over pitch, and orchestrated a dandy, dizzying, nonstop give-and-take between positive and negative space.

In his maniacal extravaganzas of excessive visual stimulation, comic figures fragment into fetishes, flipping positions with their surroundings. Depending upon where you focus your attention, giant faces appear to materialize out of thin air, polished fingernails become drops of blood, leaves look like eyes, vaginas or tears, and tonsils stand in for clitorises. The legs, chests and crotches of brawny athletes and pajama-clad musclemen symbolize Pittman’s acrobatic and ambidextrous mastery of multiple libidinous impulses.

But the biggest change in his flaming paintings is that they can no longer be described as decorative--if by decorative one means mere embellishment and supplementary marginalia. Although Pittman’s art is still adamantly frilly, silly and filled with curly-cues, arabesques, patterns and polka-dots, it’s now become too aggressively impudent and decisively brazen to be thought of as anything but major.

Pittman hasn’t abandoned his fascination with decoration in favor of a conservative version of macho paint-slinging. He’s just raised the stakes of the debate over what counts as serious painting to such vertiginous heights that the usual terms have been turned inside-out. In his accessible, content-packed images, clear-cut oppositions no longer make sense.

* Rosamund Felsen Gallery, 8525 Santa Monica Blvd., (310) 652- 9172, through Saturday. Closed Sundays and Mondays.