Venice

Rummaging around in the rich trove of Charles Garabedian’s recent paintings, a viewer finds dollar signs, antique Greek torsos, square Aztec bodies, Pacific Northwest masks, arrowheads, artichokes and clenched fists. A rhythmic pulse of images invented, repeated and discarded fuel the larger, more intricate works. Rows of identical uptilted women’s heads part like waves in an enchanted sea. Clumsy figures the artist calls “mutants” lurch into wild “e” positions in a calmly classical landscape. A Greek amphitheater looks oddly like a spaceship.

Other paintings focus on a few monumental figures in a broad range of moods. In “Romeo and Juliet,” a large-featured, distracted woman touches fingertips with a mauve-skinned fellow in wing tips--the gesture and the unreal coloring suggesting the doomed nature of this romance. Nude “Miss Fisher” belies her prim title by exposing her genitals to public view.

Sure, sometimes the artist goes over the deep end and works so nakedly the stuff begins to look corny. In “Man Tearing His Heart Out,” a Pygmy-like fellow reaches into his chest to remove the offending organ. A nearby Lorelei seems to be the source of the poor guy’s anguish.

A handful of reticent abstract works from the late ‘60s seem rather beside the point next to the willfully idiosyncratic work he is turning out in his own vigorous late 60s. (L.A. Louver Gallery, 55 N. Venice Blvd. and 77 Market St., to Feb. 10.)