Pittmania '07

The plethora of works on paper — including the Hammer-acquired adventures-of-a-blue-egg series Superstition, Noise & Symbolism #1–10 (the only titled work in the show) — offer more clear, specific content. They could be Futurist Ouspenskian tarot cards or pages torn from an ornate calendar designed by Eastern European folk-primitive-quoting Modernists like Marc Chagall or Natalia Goncharova, with faux- Cyrillic text suggesting verbal language without engaging its treacherous specificity. The seven large-scale paintings dispense even further with linearity, though the complexity and dynamism of the compositions are undiminished. As always, energies are constrained, and fluids burst forth from orifices and cascade past or through translucent entities who tumble from one vertiginous plane to an equal but incompatible universe. Luminous hot spots, grayed-out Day-Glo chicken scratchings, and fried eggs jitter across the surface.

Somehow it all makes sense. In spite of the blurred semiotics, Pittman’s work still grabs, holds, orchestrates and choreographs attention in ways that are both highly pleasurable and instructive to the eye. This apparent return to his late-’80s abstract indeterminacy manages to fold in all the robust formal experimentation and noir content of the intervening years, while freeing the work from its culture-specific moorings. In a career that resembles a virtuosic balancing act, Pittman’s new work is a dazzling conflation of a hard-wired populism and conservative elitism (in the best, nurturing sense) that raises the stakes to a global level.

LARI PITTMAN | Regen Projects II, 9016 Santa Monica Blvd. | Through October 20