WILSHIRE CENTER

Roger Selden’s deceptively simple paintings/collages are concerned with signs and ciphers. This is not so much the intellectual world of semiotics or linguistics but rather a highly personal, childlike reduction of the universe to random significations that coalesce or disperse like flotsam and jetsam on the surface of the ocean. Selden’s “ocean” is his canvas, amorphous “seas” of pigment in blue, gray, red or salmon that act as vague contexts for the litter of objects, stencils, letters and children’s drawings that the artist embeds in them.

Crudely rendered hats, chairs and pairs of glasses rub shoulders with real wristwatches, rulers and doll-house toys, either in overcrowded agglomerations or dispersed in sparse landscapes, much as if the collages of Raymond Saunders had been filtered through the aesthetic of Cy Twombly.

The comparison to Twombly is significant, as both artists are Americans living and working in Europe (Selden has resided in Italy for the past 20 years) and both oeuvres express a certain dislocation, a rootlessness tempered by clutching onto objective forms and popular archetypes. Whereas Twombly is all wavering line and doodling sprawl, however, Selden’s images are concrete, often arranged into recognizable grids, or at least independently self-contained icons.

Selden’s work is deliberately difficult to fathom, largely because he eschews narrative and context, refusing to tie together his images either as memories, metaphors or a system of signs. There is a lopsided look to his composition, as if asymmetry and controlled chaos is a normal structural schema. As a result, the images are either immediately accessible and recognizable, or maddeningly abstruse (often simultaneously), and the work lacks an overt emotional resonance that might tie the structural loose ends together. That, however, is exactly Selden’s point. To paraphrase Frank Stella, “What you see is what you see.” (Roy Boyd Gallery, 170 S. La Brea Ave., to Feb. 4.)