Sam Messer’s heavily painted canvases manage to evoke the mythical sensibilities of Jackson Pollock’s work of the early ’40s, and at the same time call attention to their contemporary self-conscious expressionism. The predominant colors in the artist’s recent paintings are red, black, yellow, and white: they are applied with fleshy bravura. The works show a maturing artist contributing to a revival of gestural painting with symbolic figuration. Messer’s sense of the macabre is balanced by a penetrating black humor. Look into the Future, 1988, depicts a very pregnant nude holding a mirror in one