La Cienega Area

In Roy Dowell’s latest paintings billboards have as much to do with figuring out the meaning of life as fine art ever could. He makes that blatantly clear by layering pieces of greatly enlarged commercial color separations into chunks of Cubist space and plugging in other pieces of a painterly vocabulary like various appliances on a power strip.

Compositions that resemble game boards take on some significance with titles like “Truth or Consequences.” Visually, however, there is just enough information to be vague. Oddly enough the painting’s insistence on meaning eventually wins and understanding quickly becomes its own perceptual game--one where reason and order come through as random assignments. That’s a lot to get out of disparate patterns, spliced together into a dense arrangement of razor sharp, geometric shapes. Yet perhaps clued to the modern, megabyte mind set, they work. Together the paintings form a loose contemporary text on abstraction that, with typical pluralist acceptance, directs thought to a myriad of possible conclusions--any and all of which are right. (Rosamund Felsen Gallery, 669 N. La Cienega Blvd., to Feb. 3.).