Paintings in Need of More Development

The sense of infantilism that has lurked beneath the surfaces of David Lloyd’s paintings for the past decade comes lumbering to the forefront of a new body of work at Chac-Mool Gallery. Dumb, bumbling and lumpy, these mid- to large-size canvases exploit all of the signs of infantile life, but are too studied and staid to convey much more than the idea of what it’s like to be a newborn infant.

Featuring amorphous, often fleshy blobs of pink and peachy pigment, the unformed figures in Lloyd’s gooey pictures are adorned with lovely little bows--in delicate shades of pink, blue, yellow and green. Tied around brush-like tufts of hair, or nipple-like protrusions, these decorative ribbons suggest that painting is an art of pre-verbal pleasures, at once polymorphous and oral.

Many of the plump, rounded forms that inhabit the indistinct landscapes of Lloyd’s canvases are punctuated with various combinations of eyes, mouths, nostrils, ears and anuses. Rarely arranged to make up complete faces or whole bodies, these randomly scattered orifices represent the chaos that comes with kids, whose immediate, all-consuming needs follow their own patterns.

Since the only bodily orifices missing from Lloyd’s bulbous beings are their genitals, it’s clear that the L.A.-based artist’s images are meant to portray pre-Oedipal life, when sustenance and physical comfort provided something like sexual satisfaction, and every experience was indescribably intense, if inarticulate.

“Ark,” the show’s largest and most ambitious painting, gives shape to the notion that an infant’s body is its entire world. Measuring 8-by-9-feet, this mixed-media work includes an actual tree branch, a thick puddle of foam insulation and a queasy mix of oil, acrylic, encaustic, resin and pigment.

This stew of materials presents a close-up of a skull-shaped planet, adrift in a smoke-filled sky above a volcanic wasteland. The lunar surface of Lloyd’s odd orb is made up of bodily openings set amid stylized renditions of a sailboat heading toward a waterfall, a garden, a forest fire, a hurricane and a pair of plastic bandages marking an X across a gaping wound.

Accompanying these simplified images that resemble the pictures found on tourist maps is a group of letters that look as if they have sprouted from the ground like organic typewriter keys. A sense of budding potential thus emanates from Lloyd’s otherwise foreboding painting.

The biggest problem with this transitional show is that it fails to chart new territory. Its pat pictures look like uninspired rehashes of Jim Lutes’ fusions of abstraction and representation and David Humphrey’s academic explorations of Freudian ambivalence.

Although the androgynous quality embodied by infants serves as a powerful model for contemporary painting, Lloyd’s new body of work is too cutesy and undeveloped to push such concerns beyond stereotypes.

* Chac-Mool Gallery, 8920 Melrose Ave., West Hollywood, (310) 550- 6792, through Oct. 1. Closed Sunday and Monday.