LA CIENEGA AREA

According to Robert Colescott, the three graces are art, sex and death, but you’d never guess he felt that way from a casual glance at one of his paintings. Humor is the first card his pictures play and they come on as bright and lovably goofy as a lumberjack in a Hawaiian-print shirt. But first impressions aren’t always accurate; Colescott’s work is, in fact, a highly informed if cartoonish recasting of history that’s rife with arcane references.

Colescott’s central theme is the history of segregation and racial and sexual stereotyping, a rather bitter pill that he coats with a generous amount of humor and irony. Interweaving fables, myths, biblical stories and recorded history (in which blacks are conspicuously absent), Colescott takes a cockeyed view of things society unquestioningly accepts. “Mother Earth (African Venus)” takes on cliched ideas concerning the perfect, primitive state, while in “Gift of the Sea” a white girl washes up on an island populated by black natives, four of whom gaze at her with varying degrees of interest.

Those who take no interest in the thematic implications of Colescott’s work may still be seduced by the look of it; he has a sinfully rich sense of color and his pictures are as eye-catching as a tea cart of exotic deserts. But it’s hard to imagine anyone finding Colescott’s history lesson off-putting; these wise, beautiful paintings are infused with a great generosity of spirit. (Koplin Gallery, 8225 Santa Monica Blvd., to May 17.)