She Brushes Aside the Doomsayers : Art review: Jacqueline Cooper’s exhibit in Costa Mesa proves that painting is joyously alive and well.

It seems laughable that pundits proclaimed the death of painting a couple of decades ago, when a select group of sharp younger abstract painters today are irrepressibly in love with the blatantly sensual aspects of the medium.

Cultivating luscious excess, they build syncopated rhythms of repeated motifs lifted from sources as diverse as stick-on pop decals or astronomy.

A case in point: Jacqueline Cooper, whose new paintings are at Griffin Linton Contemporary Exhibitions through Sunday. Working in a newly enlarged format, Cooper piles on pools and veils of color, skinny whiplash strokes, French curves and wallpaper-pattern motifs.

The net effect is nearly always of joyous delirium. Unabashedly feminine, these paintings dance through zones once forbidden to “serious” painters: dime-store dazzle, preteen passions and the languid flow of bodily juices.

In “All Dressed Up and Nowhere to Go,” vertical patterns of silver Christmas tree ball shapes, navy cartoon daisies and blood-red, needle-fine calligraphy skate around pools of yellowish paint. “The Second Biggest Lie in the World” is propelled by a black-centered peach and green motif vaguely reminiscent of cocktail olives. “Barbie Signs Off” cheerfully mingles lashings of purple “ribbon” with blue and white floral decal patterns.

An honors graduate of the Otis School of Art and Design in Los Angeles, Cooper is now in graduate school at UCLA. Already making a quantum leap in complexity and finesse from the small pieces she showed at Griffin in a January group show, she seems well on her way to a singularly personal style.

Also at the gallery: a photographic series, “Interior,” by Derek Seelig and three large paintings by Mick Gronek.

* New work by Jacqueline Cooper, through Sunday at Griffin Linton Contemporary Exhibitions, 1640 Pomona Ave., Costa Mesa. Hours: noon to 5 p.m. Saturday and Sunday, and by appointment. Admission: free. (714) 646-5665.