Inextricable References : Inventive works give character to restrictive modernist abstraction and add sense of playfulness from pop’s irreverent, lowbrow glories.

NEWPORT BEACH — Yum. There’s so much luscious stuff in “1997 Biennial” at the Orange County Museum of Art that it’s tempting simply to celebrate it. And there is a lot to celebrate. But some of the fun is spoiled by the blinkered way chief curator Bruce Guenther makes his case for the works he selected by 10 Los Angeles artists.

In his brief remarks in the show’s catalog, Guenther keeps referring to the pieces in the show as if they sprang from a purely formalist sensibility. With a palpable sense of relief, he heralds a body of work that doesn’t wave a sociopolitical flag and emphasizes such properties as “structure, light, color and sound.”

But the appeal of many of these wildly inventive works is precisely that they crack open the sanitized strictures of modernist abstraction and add a sense of playfulness derived from pop culture in all its irreverent and lowbrow glory.

With the greatest of Postmodernist ease, the artists--most of whom are in their 30s--glide in and out of the realms of landscape, still life, figurative art and abstraction. Yet the sensual pleasure these works provide is inextricable from their casual references to such things as bodily functions, fashion, cartooning and dumb humor.

Monique Prieto works out the eccentric, utterly flat shapes in her paintings on a computer, even including the “drips,” which look as though they’re controlled by invisible magnets. Small, flattened areas of color balance weightlessly on attenuated or expansive shapes with eccentric silhouettes.

Reflecting the casual spatial exaggerations of cartooning and rave-scene graphic art, Prieto’s imagery impishly conflates elements of Pop Art and Color Field painting. Fundamentally abstract, this work also has a loopy narrative quality--abetted by Prieto’s use of flesh-toned shapes--that suggests anything from a parade of models in hats (“Chronicle”) to somebody literally drooling over a banana split (“Protest”).

Dennis Hollingsworth’s big canvases are bursting with tactile wonders crafted from paint: piles of thick oval slabs, spiky little balls, stretchy bits like the chewed gum left underneath student desks, a spray of tiny, flesh-colored shards.

Weirdly enough, the overall effect of Hollingsworth’s paintings sometimes evokes a mundane landscape: Passages in both “Secular Habits” and “Doubting Thomas” suggest an aerial view of an architect’s model for a suburban subdivision.

In Terri Friedman’s kinetic piece “Growing Up in Public,” yellow and orange liquids noisily spurt up twin plastic channels as if in competition, then trickle down to a pair of oversized fiberglass baby shoes and race upward again in perpetual motion.

The carnival flavor of the piece amusingly dramatizes the perpetual pattern of infant nutrition as a sort of cosmic game.

Carlos Mollura offers a fresh take on minimalist sculpture by using plastic to sculpt air. Whereas a Donald Judd or a Carl Andre was strictly concerned with the physical attributes of his factory-fabricated modular pieces, Mollura’s untitled stack of puffy cubes is broadly referential.

The neatly stacked sacks of air, hooked together by small red valves, have a humorous explosive potential: They are a stunt waiting for a pratfall. Their man-made, see-through material recalls ‘60s mod fashion, which cheerfully co-existed with Minimalist high art. Filled with air like beach balls--banal accouterments of the Southern California coast--they also propose an alternative vision to the cool refinement of the Light and Space artists.

Don Giffin reinvents stain painting by layering color in such a way that it emits an inner radiance verging on iridescence. But the magic erodes at the edges of his panels, where the layers separate as if the whole mirage was merely a chemical trick. While stain painting was about learning to harness gravity, this work reveals the willfulness of artists’ materials.

Video artist Jessica Bronson tweaks landscape painting and abstraction with conventions borrowed from TV show credits, electronic malfunction and the sort of poetry that strains futilely for metaphorical freshness.

It might have been a better move to show Carter Potter’s furniture pieces, which wittily rework decorator pieties, rather than his widely seen paintings made from woven strips of film leader. Still, the latter recently have evolved in promising directions.

In “Red-Painted Leader,” the illusory medium of film obligingly transforms itself into a monochromatic painting, icon of modernist art. But the domestic art of weaving softens the male-driven cult of modernism, and the delicate pointillism of the sprocket holes recalls the embossed patterns that adorn medieval religious painting.

One unlikely piece dives into the place where banality, philosophical pronouncement and the photographer’s stubbornness meet. In a sequence of small Cibachrome photographs, “Wave,” Robert Blanchon repeatedly isolates and packages (in bright blue frames) a staple of Southern California beach lore.

But rather than inviting us “to ponder the meaning of its repetition, and the possibility of its replicating its form,” in Guenther’s wooden description, the sequence is really an admission of defeat. The viewer gets no insight from looking at reproductions of a bunch of waves, regardless of the skill or derring-do involved in photographing them. The gulf between the superficial attractiveness of these images and their inherent emptiness is at the heart of this piece.

There few disappointing works in the show--conceptually thin pieces, such as Chris Wilder’s stripe paintings produced with gaffer’s tape, or Julia Couzens’ cloying, mucous-like blob with protruding doll limbs (“Congeries No. 2”)--that lack the ironic ambivalence that energizes the others.

But surely a major aspect of assembling such a show is being able to articulate what makes it so special. Catch-phrases such as “focused self-awareness” and “end of the millennium” hardly do the job. Perhaps Guenther should let the artists’ words stand alone in his next biennial venture.

* “1997 Biennial,” Orange County Museum of Art, 850 San Clemente Drive, Newport Beach. Hours: 11 a.m.-5 p.m., Tuesday-Sunday. $5 general, $4 seniors and students, free for children under 16. Through June 8. (714) 759-1122.