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Art Review

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SPECIAL TO THE TIMES

Punch and Dazzle: Takashi Murakami’s second solo show in Los Angeles makes his prior exhibition--which included powdery monochrome paintings, a mural-size portrait of Mickey Mouse’s evil twin and several menacing pictures of fang-studded flesh--look like a stroll in the park. Two new sculptures and two paintings fill Blum & Poe Gallery with enough whiplash visual energy to keep your head spinning long after you leave the Tokyo-based artist’s eye-popping extravaganza, in which explicit fantasies overwhelm what usually passes for everyday life.

Murakami’s sculptures are comic-book figures realized in three dimensions. With fiendishly exaggerated features, slickly air-brushed anatomies and wildly self-absorbed gestures, the larger-than-life-size pair of cartoons is not for children.

It’s impossible not to notice that they’re naked. But that’s hardly their most captivating aspect. “My Lonesome Cowboy” and “Hiropon” fascinate because they wear their astonishingly stylized bodies as if they were costumes that could be shrugged off at a whim.

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Despite their graphic poses, this dynamic duo’s oversize, consummately crafted eyes are their most pornographic component. Although it’s impossible to describe the pair as innocent, they embody a sweet sense of being out of touch. Strange as it may seem, this makes them weirdly charming--and more than a little disturbing.

While it’s clear which one is female and which is male (she’s jumping rope, he’s twirling a lightning bolt of a lasso), it’s hard to know if she’s a girl or a woman, and whether he’s a man or a boy. Murakami raises this ambiguity to a feverish pitch, leaving viewers free to come up with their own answers.

Installed in the compact gallery, his 8-by-16-foot paintings function as backdrops for his diabolical sculptures. On their own, Murakami’s acrylics-on-linen would be as bold as billboards. In delicate shades of powder-puff pink and baby blue, each flat expanse of crisp color is interrupted by a finely painted splash of milky white, which dips and curves from one end to the other.

Recalling Japanese paintings of roiling, stylized seas, Murakami’s minimalized renditions compress loads of linear energy into single abstract gestures. As a whole, his art combines the punch of popular comic books with the dazzle of animated movies and the formality of traditional imagery, giving razor-sharp form to the anxiety-laced times of his generation.

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* Blum & Poe Gallery, 2042 Broadway, Santa Monica, (310) 453-8311, through Aug. 1. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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