"POP and Circumstance" in Dania Is a Mostly Pleasing Show

As the cheeky title indicates, this small group show replaces pomp with POP with mixed but mostly pleasing results. Perhaps inspired by his own latest series, gallery owner Timothy Leistner invited four fellow artists to submit works that partake in a style best represented by Andy Warhol. Leistner's contributions are three mixed-media works that combine color travel photos with cheerfully cartoonish watercolor imagery in the form of a superhero called Romance Man, whose paraphernalia include a bouquet of flowers and hearts sewn to his sleeves. Equally cartoonish are the explosive mixed-media works of Francisco Sheuat, who creates images built up from strips of soda cans supplemented by the acrylic interjections of the titles: Boom! Bam! Kapow! Think Batman comics and the '60s TV series they inspired. His best work here, however, is the intricate, symmetrical Pop Quilt made up of strips of Coke cans. The brightly colored canvases of Jacklyn Laflamme fit perfectly in this context, although the artist has also started bringing the imagery into three dimensions with metal sculptures. Her silvery, five-foot-tall Martini Glass, for instance, has a cityscape literally bursting from the glass, echoing the skyscrapers found in three nearby paintings. Odd man out here is probably Rick Esposito, whose paintings of pseudo-pointillist geometric forms are eye-catching but don't really add much to the cocktail conversation about pop going on around them. And to my eye, the mixed-media works of Andrew Horton have a greater affinity for surrealism than for pop. Horton combines such disparate elements as metal spikes, wax, antique frames, watercolor, gouache, and colored pencil, and the results are often riveting. He's a welcome if slightly displaced guest at this fun little pop party.