In these paintings, technique and imagination run wild

The kitchen sink is just about the only thing that doesn't appear in David Pappaceno's paintings at Green Street Gallery. The young artist has a voracious imagination, one that shuffles Abstract Expressionism with underground comics, Renaissance frescoes with Spaghetti Westerns. The paintings have a pop-inflected visual punch, and sometimes they're just too feverish. Nonetheless, Pappaceno is an artist to watch.

He deploys a range of techniques and materials, alternating metallic pigments with enamel and acrylic paint, building voluptuous scenes from tiny flecks. The backdrop of ``A Cardiogenic Fugue" is a Technicolor sunset, from which emerges a godly forearm loosely holding a heart. There's a self-portrait in the bottom foreground, in which the artist's skull has been cut open and a rulebook lies across his exposed brain.

``Gang Green," in contrast, is a flat color-field work clearly paying tribute to, and affectionately teasing, Barnett Newman . Pappaceno has replaced Newman's famous ``zip," a vertical line down the canvas, with a vividly painted zipper, slightly open at the top. Squirming naked figures amass there. These are Pappaceno's signature; in ``A Cardiogenic Fugue," they sweep through the sky like blushing butterflies. In ``Gang Green," they're green. Always, they morph newborn out of squiggles of paint, all breasts and legs and bottoms, comical chains of desire and vulnerability.

``Pepto Dismal" dissects the juicy Expressionist brush stroke. The large canvas dances with swipes of thick multicolored paint, but Pappaceno rendered each swipe strand by strand. He has also painted the pinkish silhouettes of fat brush strokes, but they're presented with such flatness, you know he labored over them. A shining, stomach-turning glop of pink sits in the middle of it all, erupting into a hand at the top, as well as the usual mass of flesh, and a box at the center, from which jumps a long green-and-red eyeball.

Does Pappaceno really need that eyeball? He pushes his paintings so hard that often the cherry on top is the final sweet that sends you into insulin shock. He's a smart, talented painter who doesn't recognize the value of reining it in.

``Global Pop," a look at some of the more Pop Art-oriented works on paper from the Bernard Toale Gallery's Boston Drawing Project, doesn't add up to much. The works don't build off one another; they float in separate universes. The show, at the Boston Center for the Arts' Mills Gallery, was organized by the Drawing Project's curator, Joseph Carroll .

Consumerism is the focus. Alfredo Conde cleverly turns shipping materials into art, making frames out of cardboard boxes that center around hand-drawn ``stamps." Julia Featheringill's ``Same but Different" series of color photographs juxtaposes a kernel of fresh corn with a candy corn. With this and other similar comparisons, it lays bare the weird exaggerations of the marketplace.

Mary Lum fashions small collages out of French comic books, using narrow strips to create architectural spaces, creating a nice tension between the flatness of the comics and the illusion of space. Here she also paints one of her drawings on the wall; change of size and medium make it more intriguing.

Robert Amesbury's lush, hot-toned ``Watering Hole" riffs on 17th-century Dutch still lifes and 20th-century travel brochures to make a vivid, cartoonish oasis. Steve Aishman explores his Japanese-American background by examining anime-inspired packaging. His gorgeous photos of cartoons layered with bright labels from candy bars and other products pulse off the wall.

Robin Dash's collage, pasted with phrases from cardboard boxes, reads like a ransom note gone soft. William DiBello hand-draws his own invented corporate logos; he's just reprising early Ryan McGinness .

Other pieces don't fit with the theme. Margaret Lanzetta's painting ``Distant Theatres" uses a lotus motif, sacred in Hindu and Buddhist cultures, as black, forbidding wallpaper. Alicia Gibson's rambling assemblage captures the scribblings of an art student -- ``Jenny Holtzer , You Go Girl!" It's sweet and geeky, but out of place.

David Pappaceno
At: Green Street Gallery, 141 Green St., Jamaica Plain, through Oct. 21. 617-522-0000, greenstreetgallery.org

Global Pop: Selections from the Boston Drawing ProjectAt: Mills Gallery, Boston Center for the Arts, 539 Tremont St., through Oct. 29. 617-426-8835, bcaonline.org

Italian Dreams
At: GASP, 362 Boylston St., Brookline, through Tuesday. 617-731-2500, g-a-s-p.net

Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons has returned from a sabbatical in Europe to curate a three-person show at her artist-run gallery, GASP, called ``Italian Dreams." It features heavy-hitters; who wouldn't want to see Campos-Pons and Carrie Mae Weems in a show together?

Weems's haunting, gorgeous video, also called ``Italian Dreams," has her wandering through iconic scenes in the Italian imagination, brooding in a black dress. She shot it on the grounds of the studio Cinecitta (where Fellini filmed), the American Academy in Rome, and the Galleria Nazionale di Arte Moderna . She's bold, and raw with longing. Her interactions with men in the film are hurt, aggressive, and unresolved.

Campos-Pons's video ``Bar Romeo" is a postcard from Italy, a tender, light-hearted scene of men gathering in a bar to sip wine and sing their lungs out. It's a bit of fluff.

Fathi Hassan's works on paper explore the relationship between Rome, where he lives, and Egypt, where he was born. They're strong drawings, laced with detail and occasional text. ``I due Androgini" shows a two-headed sphinx with a golden leopard's body and a black face highlighted with gold. Pieces like this are iconographic; Hassan deals with the dark and the light, and the seeds of civilization.