Imagine the visual culture of the past four decades—everything from comic strips and psychedelic posters to Abstract Expressionist classics—gathered into one big sloppy playpen, and you have some idea of the jumble from which the young American painter Carroll Dunham pieces together his abstract paintings. Dunham can’t get his scrapbook-style paintings to cohere, but he has more gut pictorial sense than most of the other artists who are wrapped up in the retro-this-and-neo-that craziness of the past few years. Dunham, who was born in 1949 and has had two one-man shows at Baskerville & Watson (the most recent was last spring), picks and chooses amidst the image bank of post-World War II America with a dandy’s sense of style. Who but a dandy would paint on thin sheets of wood veneer, as Dunham invariably does? This artist is a connoisseur of materials: he likes to combine paint, powdered pigments, and lots of different graphic media. The paintings have the light, vibrant color of Fifties moderne. Dunham seems to want to get lost in his flights of fancy, and he certainly knows how to embroider a surface. As compositions, the paintings are limp—they hardly exist—and yet there’s an unusual intensity to some of the bits and pieces.

If there’s any single impulse dominating the art and fashion world today, it’s retro madness. Retro is about remembering; it’s prepackaged nostalgia. But the pose is street-smart, canny, never sentimental, and the images tend to be raucous, flashbulb bright, rather than mist-shrouded