The surfaces of Keith Morrison's paintings give onto a big, broad world of teeming event. That world is both outside and in -- memory and observed happenstance, symbol and material fact, self and not-self. The breadth is related to Morrison's own cultural bearings, accumulated by him -- some willingly, some not -- from near and far. Morrison hails from Jamaica and has lived since 1959 in American cities -- Chicago, Nashville, Washington and, lately, San Francisco. Not least of all, Morrison carries with him a composite, and purposefully selective, painting culture that in itself symbolizes his overall, piquant sense of identity as mixture. In the paintings, all such discontinuous matters are ordered by way of syntactic views that permit abrupt shifts in space and scale. They show imaginary land- or cityscapes -- and, occasionally, still-life arrangements -- within which each thing sensibly, if uneasily, finds its place in relation to others.

Morrison began as a painter of reductivist abstractions. He looked for ways to, as he has said, "condense messages into pure shapes." Clear, flat shapes, the lingua franca of the 1960s, he soon realized, couldn't carry the density of message he was after, so he proceeded to flesh them out. How far Morrison has come from the containments of minimalism may be signaled by the simple fact that all the works in the present show are oil paintings, and whatever else may go into them, Morrison handles oil paint ecstatically. The ecstasy is contagious: in sheer body heat, the "whatever else" -- even the most outright satire or cautionary tale -- is tricked out like a bacchanal,

Ecstasy thrives at the rim of chaos. Or, better, reverse those terms: a chaos bred of cultural confusions has become so familiar that Morrison's sensibility can dance within it, dervish-fashion. All that exists here is on dangerous, or anyway shaky, ground. Posed along an incline plane, shapes -- a regular repertory company of slave dolls, Nigerian ibeji figures, and assorted land and sea animals -- register that any second the floor might slip away from under them. There is in fact very little "floor" as such; most of Morrison's feverish tableaux are set on, or include, bodies of water or else the juices in which all manner of stuff gets stirred, provisionally held in place by the universal pot or skillet. Where solid footing does occur it is likely to be that of an alleyway or, as in the audacious zap of "Red Sea," boundless sand. (Around the stewpots, of course, stretch only miles of burning coals.)

It is always either high noon or nighttime in Morrison's places; shadows, when they are cast, tend to lie flat and squat below. This wide-open lighting system in the pictures is what aligns their narratives with those of the so-called "magic realism" of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and other contemporary Central American writers: it proclaims suprarational occurrence as the norm within persuasive fictive space. Practically, however, the pictures' light owes its existence and continuity to the choices and moves of an expert colorist, (Watch how, in the overall glare of "CyberCity," Morrison's reverberant secondaries -- orange, green and violet -- make with edgy, optical pops and clicks.) A spangled snake will wind across a color area -- hideous and enchanting in its langour. A parrot presides at the center of disjunct creation, a self-appointed cosmic orator. If, as Morrison says, actual human figures would be "too literal" here, the dolls and figurines are so invested with secrets they permit no ordinary social contact. Like the places they inhabit, they are plainly psychic emanations -- to be approached warily.