The eminently dramatic appearance of William Pettet’s “mature” (at twenty-five) style on the Los Angeles scene came last summer in the form of scores of large canvases painted within four months time. There was suddenly this hugely efflorescent, opulent, sometimes sinister and, one suspected, accidentally achieved collection of wetly painted, air-blown curiosities; they seemed initially to have little to do with any L.A. esthetic “tradition,” at first recalling Louis and Olitski, but with none of their coolly arrived at, and reassuring, sense of ballast. Out of the approximately 30 works I