Downtown

Painter Robert Dowd has a reputation as a Pop artist. Indeed his most recent paintings of wine bottles and apples buzz with chic painterly marks that do have an updated Pop sensibility--reflecting the trendy commercialism of the current art market. But that doesn’t stop them from looking like magazine illustrations for classy wine.

With titles like “Object Event” and “Quantum Event” Dowd is trying to capture something of modern physics’ concept that all matter is composed of swirling subatomic particles. But the dumb, cartoonish nature of his zinging lines just can’t get serious. The whirling reality they narrate is more Walt Disney than Niels Bohr. Unfortunately, it’s difficult to know if this work is intended to parody commercial design or simply wind up looking like it.

That confusion doesn’t affect the three artists who are included in the accompanying “Pop for the Nineties” exhibit. Their intent is clearly to incorporate the mass-produced images and items of the contemporary society. Paul Carpenter isn’t interested in content. His untitled hard-edged paintings of electric fans in changing brash colors are simply pure colorist examinations of form. Andy Yoder does a kind of Claes Oldenburg number by taking everyday items out of context and looking at them as shapes. He juxtaposes the shapes of toilet seats and horseshoes, lunch buckets and barns for some nice visual puns. Most political and most socially sensitive are Marcy Watton’s ambiguous-violence paintings. They effectively use newspaper cartoons and scenes from television to deal with issues like rape and assault. (Koslow Gallery, 2507 W. 7th St., to May 27).