Sugar, Spice and Everything Nice? Not Quite

As lusty and fearless as the marauding little girls they depict, Kim Dingle’s paintings at Blum & Poe Gallery embody old myths about the savagery of the young and make up new ones about a brave new world of contentedly fallen angels. That the paintings betoken more than revenge, however, is both their power and grace.

If this newest generation of painted curly-haired moppets in frilly dresses, white lace socks and Mary Janes isn’t as aggressive as their predecessors--who loved to wrestle nude in doorways, throw fits, stones or one another out windows--they still behave like tiny revolutionaries with nothing to lose, playing touch football with unsuspecting guinea pigs or watching blithely as grown-ups tumble down precipitous stairways. But most often they turn upon themselves, transforming their would-be power trip into a collective suicide mission, all the more poignant for its misfired machisma.

It might be said that, like Nicole Eisenman’s cartoony murals and drawings of wild-eyed Amazons torturing legions of dimwitted, male antagonists, Dingle’s paintings ooze irony from their very pores. Yet irony connotes a certain knowingness, perhaps even a smugness that these paintings entirely lack.

On the other hand, Dingle is no sentimentalist. She is a ferocious painter with a delicate touch (think Fragonard, especially when you look at those pearly-white dresses), all the better to mislead her viewers.

Guiding us astray is one of her longtime strategies. Erasing and transposing remain two of her favorite tricks.

Camouflage is another, and it’s the prime strategy of most of the paintings shown here, which are crammed with details both obfuscatory and not: the luscious grain of the unpainted wood support, tangles of ivy leaves that aren’t content to remain in the background, intermittent fecal smears or globs and dozens upon dozens of exaggeratedly bucolic or suggestively sinister vignettes, which occasionally--magically--worm their way up somebody’s dress.

Messing around with generic conventions has been Dingle’s way to seize control of a medium that is still hostile to interlopers. It remains an exhilarating thing to watch.

Some might grumble about Dingle’s continued allegiance to painting her pint-sized alter egos. Perhaps she realizes that to abandon them would be to mimic their own fatal bravado.

* Blum & Poe Gallery, 2042 Broadway, Santa Monica, (310) 453-8311, through Oct. 11. Closed Sunday and Monday.