SANTA MONICA

Bogdan Perzynski, a Polish-born artist who has been teaching in Santa Barbara, holds an endearingly wrong-headed exhibition. About 18 large painting-assemblages are dun-colored and downbeat as if terribly worried about something. The first encountered is a grimy diptych bearing an abstract shape resembling palm fronds. A sign across them reads, “Don’t be the artist all the time,” but that is exactly what Perzynski is too much of the time.

Anyone familiar with the visual vocabularies of Jasper Johns, Jim Dine and William Wiley will have an idea of Perzynski’s work. Occasionally he even outstrips his sources by revealing them. He clarifies his paraphrase of Johns’ body-part assemblages by appending the word, “Pain.”

The art wrings its hands over the current fashion for semiotics in an image of a microphone captioned, “I connect nothing with these words.” It is all balled up in art issues when you get the feeling it wants to be funny, earthy and lyrical. A diagrammatic image of a human heart with a funnel attached is touching. One painting has a circle of words beginning with “A Desire” and ending with, “A Rose” as if trying to lift its own spirits out of an intellectual funk. There is real intelligence and an authentic sensibility here, but it has to stop being an artist all the time. (Shoshana Wayne Gallery, 1454 5th Street to Aug. 1.)