Venice

To look seriously at Charles Garabedian’s work is to get involved with a maverick intuition that pieces together a private visual language out of bits and pieces of information. A group of his paintings and prints from the past few years allude to cross-cultural currents in tantalizing ways.

In “The Passing of Montezuma” (1987), rows of dark slanting blocks with Aztec sculpture-like facial features occupy a central black strip. Next to it, yellow and blue-black images of curled fists and vases alternate on a body of water. The fists and the army of heads possibly allude to the fact that the 16th-Century Aztec ruler was killed by stones thrown by his own subjects, who believed he had capitulated to the Spanish conqueror, Cortes. But regardless of precise meaning, the spontaneity of the paint handling combined with the serial ordering of the individual objects creates a fine tension that’s worth dealing with on pure visual terms.

“Cultural Escape”--a seven-panel set of aquatints with such individual titles as “Inquisition” and “Samurai”--roams through snatches of imagery variously suggestive of concentration camps (a swastika, barbed wire, a silhouetted nude figure standing in a helpless posture), Japan and Southeast Asia (a fan shape, a kite, a grimacing god’s face). Nervous borders of multiple thin lines frame a vocabulary of meaningful and inscrutable forms and markings, and the series just keeps dancing along to a strong, eccentric rhythm of its own devising. (L.A. Louver, 77 Market St., to March 11.)