Michael Bevilacqua's candy-colored, hard-edge paintings are an uncanny combination of clinical and ingratiating, with enough smart-boy energy to qualify as late Neo-Geo. They are heavily perfumed with logos and graphics of popular culture from the 50's to the 90's: the names of fashion designers, rock bands and television shows, drift cross his surfaces -- Air, Pulse, Gucci, the Teletubbies, Willy Wonka, the Avengers. Art references also abound: stylized images from Matthew Barney's ''Cremaster 4'' are frequent, sometimes rendered in the stripped-down style and starchy palette of John Wesley, who is also represented by this gallery.
There's an entertaining complexity to these meticulously made works, which, despite their sense of things being appropriated, altered, diced, spliced and re-spliced, do not involve the use of a computer. They are highly entertaining. Stripes and flame motifs lifted from racing-car manuals are filled in with patterns from Pucci; the logo for the designer Andre Courreges is flipped and multiplied to form a pattern that echoes some of Mr. Barney's sexual motifs.
But while it is entertaining to parse these images logo by logo, and to trace motifs (and sometimes entire paintings) from canvas to canvas, the works as a whole can be monotonous and hard to look at. It is almost as if Mr. Bevilacqua's ideas and his polished technique lack an essential connecting link, a kind of visual sensuousness that would enable the eye to absorb and be absorbed rather than be kept restlessly on the move.