Energy of the street fills 'Electric Wasteland'

BEVERLY -- Gritty, graphic, and pulpy, urban art draws on such sources as graffiti, comic books, folk art, and design. In the exhibit "Electric Wasteland: Urban Art From L.A. " at Montserrat College of Art, it grabs you by the throat.

Ultimately, though, urban art -- at least in this show -- is more interesting as a trend than it is as art. A rising tide of it has been tickling at the shores of area institutions this past year; the New Art Center in Newton, the Boston Center for the Arts, and the Rhode Island School of Design have all hosted shows. Many of the artists are entrepreneurs with design firms or publishing concerns. They show in commercial galleries while continuing to work on the street, erasing boundaries between fine art, design, and street art and parlaying their identities as guerrilla artists for profit.

Like latter-day Andy Warhols, they're messing with the sanctity of fine art -- and that's always good. By giving it away on the street, they're thumbing their noses at the idea of art as commodity. At the same time, like Warhol, they're capitalizing on it.

Los Angeles is a hotbed of urban art. The best work in "Electric Wasteland" is that of the Date Farmers, the duo Armando Lerma and Carlos Ramirez . Their aesthetic embraces Mexican murals, prison tattoos, and Catholic iconography. They paint on found boards and corrugated steel. Curator Leonie Bradbury has conjoined six of their pieces in one pulsing assemblage that has the vitality of a city wall covered in posters.

"Loco Snake" hangs right beside "Puto Scorpion, " each showing a dark-eyed man whose broad-shouldered body has become a canvas for a tattoo. The figures, drawn with delicate cross-hatching, look like tattoos and loom darkly over colorful backgrounds. These works brood, challenge, and offer no easy explanations.

The punchy comic-book styles of Aaron White and Dave Kinsey , in contrast, serve up too much shallow angst and sentimentality. White, a commercial animator, makes gorgeous paintings; his backgrounds are interestingly layered and textured. But the boldly drawn characters he paints over them -- as in "Un Reve S'Echappe," in which a green androgynous figure swoops in, gripping a cross-eyed cassette player -- all convey a sappy adolescent woundedness.

Kinsey specializes in giant, muscular, empty-eyed men. In his black-and-white wall painting "The Prospects of Despair," several of them huddle together to one side as a large hand reaches toward the stems of cut flowers across the wall. It's an overblown emblem of broken manhood striving for salvation. Kinsey's style is vivid and assured, but his men are trite and wasted; they have nothing of the intrigue of the Date Farmers's men.

Like the Date Farmers, Jeff Soto makes provocative paintings. His depict surreal hybrids of men and vegetables; they're disturbing and comic. But Soto's installation "Supernova," which embraces two gallery walls and stretches to 30 feet, runs into the same problem seen in many of the pieces in the shows at the New Art Center, BCA, and RISD.

Call it art in need of Ritalin: There are so many images and so many ideas whizzing through, they don't coalesce into anything larger. Soto includes magazine ads, soft-core porn, an old report card, and cassette tapes alongside his own paintings and drawings. "Supernova" suggests that the artist just kept adding things randomly until the sheer scale of the piece swallows up the viewer, at which point whatever it's about doesn't seem to matter.

Except it does.

These artists, all in their 30s, have burgeoning careers, probably because the allure of bringing street art into the gallery is, for dealers and curators eager for the next new thing, irresistible. And the work has an eye-candy quality that, in the art world, isn't usually coupled with the morose masculine neuroses that characterize most of today's comic book superheroes.

These works do broach an exploration of masculinity -- one that embraces both violence and sensitivity -- that deserves further and more nuanced attention. "Electric Wasteland" is worth seeing not so much as an art exhibition, but as an inkling of what's to come.