Creative dissonance is the point of Ali's exhibit at the DeCordova

In this work, a ponytailed girl has a goatee.

"Deceptively simple" is a phrase frequently used to describe the style of artists like Laylah Ali. Ali, based in Williamstown, is the subject of a small show of recent drawings at the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park called "Notes/Drawings/Untitled Afflictions."

But when does deceptively simple become just plain simple? After all, when you consider the possibilities open to someone who sits down at a table to draw, Ali gives up on a lot before she has even begun. Her figures here sit front and center on the picture plane, and they are as resolutely two-dimensional as Egyptian hieroglyphs or South Park cartoons.

So: No modeling, no composition.

Her line, which channels the influence of folk art, cartoons, and the drawing of children, is slow, gauche, anti-virtuosic. Her figures' faces are not individuated; they are generic, with signs of individuality grafted on. In place of noses they all have two dots for nostrils, but their eyes, for instance, are differentiated by colored outlines, or blacked out, or a little more wide open than the others.

Although Ali has an evident love of patterning, rarely does her colored ornamentation suggest the kind of tension or expansiveness that patterning at its best can achieve, because the drawing it fills in is itself so static.

So, whence this idea that Ali's work is "deceptively simple," as DeCordova assistant curator Dina Deitsch states in her catalog essay?

I suspect it stems in part from academic notions about identity and its representation that derive from the kind of identity politics that were big in the '80s and '90s. The identities of sexual, social, and religious groups, according to this thinking, are deemed to have dangerously stereotypical markers - Muslim women wearing bur kas, for instance. Ali gets plaudits for "subverting" these conventional markers by mixing them up, making them impossible to read.

One drawing here, for instance, depicts a girl running. She has a pink dress and blond hair, but she also sports a goatee. How confusing! Another image shows a frowning girl with a bob, speckles on her face that look like five o'clock shadow, and a Native American feathered headdress.

There is no clear rhyme or reason to these dissonant features: Dissonance is itself the point.

Ali's show at the DeCordova consists of three dozen drawings in gouache, colored pencil, and ballpoint pen. What marks them out from her earlier drawings is that they are overlaid with writing. Ali has collected snippets of text from various sources, including her imagination, and written them down.

She presents them as numbered lists that run down the center of each image but bear no discernible relation to the image itself. Some of the phrases stick in the mind. But unlike the poetry of, say, John Ashbery, who also riffs on "found" phrases, they amount to no more than a list; they await transformation into art.

A full third of the works here have no image at all; they are just text. The phrases that appear in these lists, and the ones overlaying images, are sometimes funny ("budgie smugglers"), frequently sinister ("Benefits and risks of informed self-surgery" or "I'll say it again: bodies are opportunities"), occasionally provocative ("Spread-eagled in a matter-of-fact, non-exploitative way"), and often deliberately banal ("Barack Obama-y" or "variety of beef products" or "No choice but to respond").

Sometimes the surrounding context may make an innocent-sounding phrase take on disturbing overtones, or make a violent image sound slightly ludicrous. Reading them, you can't avoid feeling curious about the sensibility that saw fit to pick them out. But the interest quickly palls, since the experience fails to deepen. The lists are so arbitrary that the peaks of curiosity they arouse eventually level out and flatline.

Ali has come up with more interesting images - both drawings and paintings - than the ones that appear here. As a rule, her work tends to grow in interest when more than one figure appears and there is some form of interaction or narrative going on (narrative is about the only form of creative expression such a rudimentary style can accommodate). Here, unfortunately, only a handful of the drawings have more than one figure, and whatever narrative they imply is not so much ambiguous as mystifying.

Ali is intelligent, capable, and provocative. But I sense from this show that her work is taking on a hermetic, solipsistic quality. She has often likened her work to writing, but if she truly wants to remain an artist rather than a poet, she needs to reach out to the world with a little more vigor. And she needs to do it with color and line, not just with words.

Sebastian Smee can be reached at ssmee@globe.com.