LA CIENEGA AREA

John Fox is a psychologist whose expressionistic paintings take on a form of visual stream of consciousness. In more skillful hands, this might have made for an interesting structural dialectic between automatism and received information, yet this overcrowded, poorly hung exhibit merely bogs down in painterly excesses and stylistic cliches.

Rather than provide insight into archetypal imagery and the psychological import of chance juxtaposition, Fox simply trots out series after series of random dream imagery--birds, coiled serpents, people with animals’ heads, inverted falling figures--in a pluralistic melange of influences that draws upon the worst self-indulgences of graffiti, Basquiat, Schnabel and Clemente. Almost every gesture can be traced to the vocabulary of another artist, whether it be the classicism and Cubism of Picasso, Jim Morphesis’ Grunewald crucifixes, Jonathan Borofsky’s surrealist figures or John Alexander’s mask-like faces.

One could argue that such a free-form effusion of sources represents the ultimate statement in historical mannerism. By reducing art to mere quotation, self-expression simply becomes an awareness that there are no subjects left to paint but the lack of subject matter. David Salle has made a successful career out of this very premise, but this particular package is so thoughtless and enveloped in ego that the result is merely one of visual overdose, devoid of both conceptual and emotional integrity. (Eilat Gordin, 644 N. Robertson Blvd., to June 4.)