Art Review

Outside the Lines: Michael Balog’s small lithographs at Cirrus Gallery are roughly the size of the vintage Barbie coloring books whose pages they mimic. And as if to spite their saccharine source material, they wreak havoc upon the ordered world of Saturday night dates (“dinner and a show”), weddings and other forms of insistently heterosexual bliss.

Instead of white gowns, black tuxes and shiny, just-back-from-the-beauty-parlor hair, Balog goes in for swirling designs that crawl indiscriminately across the page in nasty decorator colors such as maroon, olive and peach. Things happen that aren’t supposed to--a woman’s head and a man’s torso are suffocated in a tangle of dung-colored doodles, a passive-aggressive gesture if there ever was one.

Balog does more than take the part of frustrated kids the world over unable to draw between the lines. In obscuring the banal narrative, Balog lures us into the complex seductive realm of the decorative. Produced in 1974, Balog’s images nevertheless feel fresh in the way Sigmar Polke’s interlaced layers of pop cultural detritus do, and David Salle’s don’t, which is to say their cool perversity is charming.

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* Cirrus Gallery, 542 S. Alameda, (213) 680-3473, through Tuesday. Closed Sunday and Monday.