Canvases That Merely Seize the Moment

Many appealing details fill Linda Day’s four new paintings at Post Gallery.

Brightly colored, these large canvases immediately grab your eye. Painted in a playful palette that would be at home in a box of crayons, they exude the optimism of kids, whose tastes favor supersaturated primaries and secondaries to the drab hues of adulthood.

Purple cartoon clouds, blazing red skies, glistening green droplets, exploding blue orbs and multicolored starbursts regularly recur across the juicy surfaces of Day’s mix-and-match paintings. Irregular lines that recall mathematical graphs and electrocardiograms often drift in the background, filling dead space with symbols of pulsating movement.

In one image, a swarm of question marks and exclamation points adds to the giddy excitement. In another, glitter sprinkled across the entire composition provides a touch of tacky glamour.

Ultimately, however, Day’s paintings do not make sufficient demands on viewers to sustain one’s interest much longer than it takes to recognize their disparate elements and sources. They’re also too sloppily painted to reward close scrutiny and look much better from far away than close up. Struggling to balance the messy fluidity of oil paint with the crisp contours of cartoons, these unresolved images are too indecisive to add up to wholes that are greater than the sum of their parts.

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* Post Gallery, 1904 E. 7th Place, (213) 622-8580, through Saturday.