View of Contemporary Life Adds No Spice to Visual Stew : Painting: Works of James Trivers at Mandeville Gallery combine glibness and passivity that yield no insights into complexities of modern life.

SAN DIEGO —  Images are cheap these days, as cheap as words. They spew forth from the screen, the page, the street, at a numbing pace, too quickly and abundantly to be absorbed, distinguished, savored or repulsed.

By the 1960s, Andy Warhol had turned this phenomenon into his personal pet. Intrigued by the apathy born of image overload, he joined the game, immortalizing the trivial and trivializing the powerful.

Artists in the ‘80s, too, have sparred with the spurious nature of contemporary life, the mesmerizing shallowness of its seductive skin. They address the predigested quality of our experiences by recycling images from advertising or from other artists in their own work. Though intended as critiques of the current situation, most such work only holds up a mirror to it, merely announcing the existence of the visual stew.

The paintings of James Trivers, now on view at UC San Diego’s Mandeville Gallery, fall into the same trap. Fragmented, jumbled images crowd his canvases as they do our daily field of vision. Each claims its nanosecond of attention, but none assumes prominence over the others. Each makes a vigorous pitch at meaning only to be drowned out by the squabble of hard sells taking place around it. Trivers tucks a thin layer of cynicism into the fold, but his distaste for the system he is exploiting is more implicit than explicit.

In “History of Art in 3-D,” one of two series on view, the Los Angeles-based artist scrambles together images from the history of Western art. Trivers abbreviates them, divorces them from any meaningful context and reproduces them on his canvases, sometimes upside-down, backwards or sideways. Monet merges with Manet in one painting, and David with Delacroix in another, while other works are given over to individual artists or monuments, such as Van Gogh or the cathedral of Notre Dame.

While trivializing his subjects through these random distortions, Trivers also attempts to sensationalize them, by painting them with 3-D effects. He paints the contours of forms more than once, using brush strokes of different colors. When seen through 3-D glasses (which the gallery provides), the brush strokes are meant to coalesce and give the illusion of vibrant, physical presences, as if the forms are occupying real space and not just the flat surface of the canvas.

Trivers’ images do quiver when seen through the glasses, but they never convincingly merge with the viewer’s space. If anything, the 3-D effect imposes a greater distance between the viewer and the work, through interjecting parody and simplistic gimmickry. If this is Trivers’ attempt to bring the static signposts of art history to life for a jaded audience, he has done a disservice to both.

“Issues Without Answers,” Trivers’ other series on view here, addresses potent themes of contemporary life--substance abuse, sexually transmitted diseases, war and peace--but again, with a combination of glibness and passivity that yields no insights. In “Peace is War,” a figure glances through People magazine from the helm of a shopping cart while bombers swoop overhead. Another blithely checks the barbecue near a grenade-tossing soldier. As dramatic as the contrasts may be, Trivers’ muddy painting style and noncommittal stance divest them of their power.

The same is true in “Science and Spirituality,” in which he mingles images of religious rites with symbols of modern technology. Complex ethical issues link these two realms, but in Trivers’ work, all parts of the visual mosaic remain equal, and this relativism makes for a bland view of truly rich subjects.

Reducing life’s limitless menu to a melange of sight bites aligns Trivers with the forces of trivialization and simplification that prevail in contemporary urban culture, most powerfully on television. Because it lacks the conviction that these forces are damaging, Trivers’ work merely adds to the morass.

The show continues through Feb. 18.