La Cienega Area

In his last show, Jamey Bair exhibited paintings where chance played the major compositional role: high-keyed, retinally charged pigments were exposed to heat so that they cracked spontaneously, giving surfaces the look of random explosions. In a printed interview, the artist suggests that he’s interested in creating visual abstractions for tangible phenomena, such as impact or breakage.

This interest turns to silk-screening in his current show. Bair uses the screen to imprint canvases with fields of star shapes which, from a distance, look like busy floral patterns and, up close, reveal themselves to be miniature versions of Roy Lichtenstein’s schematic comic book explosions.

Each silk-screened canvas is keyed to its own chromatic range. In one large canvas, floral units sweep the spectrum of reds, from bright crimson to deep maroon; another canvas takes us through ranges of green. The silk-screened shape and color is topped by successive layers of hand-applied, high-gloss varnish, so works seem at once crude and polished. Bair deliberately mixes visual metaphors: the works lie somewhere between the vernacular, tacky abstraction found in comics, camouflage or wallpaper and the glossy finery of Old Master art. His conceptual base is rich and complex, but the resulting imagery doesn’t do it justice. (Michael Kohn Gallery, 313 N. Robertson Blvd., to July 19.)