Three years ago at Houston’s Contemporary Art Museum, Benito Huerta showed semiabstract works with geopolitical overtones, which were obsessively painted and socially conscious, but dull. While he was working on that series he put aside other ideas that he felt hadn’t gelled, or didn’t fit the sequence. Huerta says his new work “is about my own ideas and their dissonant tone against my oeuvre and within its own body.” For sheer energy and imagination, this salon-style explosion of dissonant bad-boy paintings blew the “good” but boring CAM show to bits.

Huerta’s images cover the spectrum from