Giddy Gamesmanship From Chris Finley

Over the past six years (and as many solo shows in Los Angeles), Chris Finley has established himself as one of the most consistently inventive artists of his generation. With a new group of works at ACME Gallery, the Petaluma, Calif.-based sculptor, who also makes installations, shows himself to be as adept with a paintbrush as he is with his more well-known three-dimensional pieces.

Titled “Level Two,” the 26-year-old artist’s giddy, mind-bending exhibition is the second installment of a planned nine-part series. Based on the rating system Nintendo uses to rank the degree of difficulty of its video games, Finley’s constellation of four paintings, five drawings and a two-part sculpture raises the stakes and picks up the pace of his “Level One,” shown in January 1997.

It’s amazing how clunky “Level One” seems, now that “Level Two” is on the market. Where the first stage of Finley’s low-tech, walk-in video game sprawled across two large galleries and included a trampoline, a disappearing alligator and a painted chamber that played tricks on your eyes, “Level Two” compresses similar effects into each of its supercharged objects.

Four extraordinarily strange paintings are the focal points of Finley’s dizzying show. Each hyperactive canvas measures 6 feet square and depicts a perfectly symmetrical--and equally silly--scenario that makes you feel as if you’ve suddenly been stricken with a case of double vision.

But causing viewers to mistrust their eyes is only the beginning of Finley’s purposefully maddening gamesmanship. Cartoonish images of bodybuilders, scissors-wielding matrons, screaming children, melting eyeballs, levitating pizzas and oversize insects assault you with such blunt forcefulness that paranoia seems to be the most reasonable response to the show. Like nothing else out there, these unprecedented paintings get your adrenaline pumping.

If you’ve got the visual stamina to keep up with Finley’s frenetic compositions, your nervous agitation will eventually give way to the clear logic that links one image to its companions. Crisply painted with industrial-strength sign paint, these aggressive panels turn the world into an energized feast for your eyes as they provide a stimulating exercise for your mind.

What Finley’s multi-part sculptures and unwieldy installations achieved in three dimensions, his paintings efficiently compress into the imaginary space of flat images.

Slapping viewers with an in-your-face challenge, his exhibition will certainly separate those able to play on “Level One” from those up to the task of mastering “Level Two.” Such willingness to challenge--and possibly lose--viewers who loved his earlier works marks Finley as an artist of the first rank.

*

* ACME Gallery, 6150 Wilshire Blvd., (213) 857-5942, through April 11. Closed Sundays and Mondays.