WILSHIRE CENTER

Paul Mathieu stacks his press-molded porcelain plates, bowls and cups with a crazy abandon, like the shaky contents of a fledgling waiter’s tray. Ponderous titles such as “The Metafictive Fallacy” and “Ostentatious Unobtrusiveness” turn out to be attached to sunny patterns in spiffy color combinations with garnishes of gold and black.

The dishes in one pile are decorated with a lush fruit theme. Another stack has red outlines of hands on a gray background and Matisse-y nudes; still another is run through with a tracery of red lines reminiscent of the London Underground map. There’s a blue bowl with jagged edges like a giant eggshell and a set of dishes with schematic landscape designs.

Mathieu strikes this viewer as a sort of Keith Haring of the ceramic world, offering the wow-this-is-contemporary-art glitz of reductive imagery and the easily decipherable facade that together spell marketability. Can a vodka ad be far behind? (Garth Clark Gallery, 170 S. La Brea Ave., to Nov. 4.)