Wilshire Center

Michael Duke Pavoni is an L.A.-based painter who mixes ‘60s Pop iconography with the signs and images of contemporary mass media. He resplices Warhol’s “Jackie” series alongside floating texts and marketing captions, while a paint-spattered Paramount Studios logo is metamorphosed into an ersatz billboard as banal as the worst MTV trailer.

The problem with recycling redundancy is that it tends to create the same passivity it claims to satirize. When Warhol transformed Jackie Kennedy or Marilyn Monroe into mass-produced icons of conspicuous consumption, his work became a self-fulfilling prophesy of individual impotence. Pavoni’s simulations not only reinforce this sense of powerlessness, they historicize it.

As social critique, Pop art was hardly the most pointed weapon in the anti-Establishment arsenal. It was as fascinated by the banal as it was horrified by it. In Pavoni’s hands, however, it simply becomes one more quotation in a smorgasbord, fighting superficiality with yet more superficiality. (Richard Green Gallery, 830 N. La Brea Ave., to Nov. 24.)