Despite a candy-colored palette and upbeat pictorial rhythms, these are Jim Lutes’ most discontented paintings. They exhibit a kind of stunned mania and a purposeful lack of conviction that is extremely absorbing. Lutes freely mixes diffident abstraction with exhausted figuration, creating images that are lazy, capricious daydreams with a profound sense of exhausted wisdom. There is a sort of fierce lassitude to his recent endeavors, a resignation that derives from his restless tinkering with imagery and with the language of paint that often serves to circumscribe or obfuscate them, all of which