Through April 28. Free. Bridgette Mayer Gallery, 709 Walnut St. 215.413.8893. www.mayerartconsultants.com
Despite their Play-Doh colors and cake-icing surfaces, Ivan Stojakovic’s paintings raise serious–even heavy–issues. Stojakovic is a Yugoslavia-born emigrant who left home in 1999 after living through the war that tore his country apart. His paintings evoke maps or diagrams of complex systems with lines of flow intersected by nodes that resemble targets. Battle maps, subway maps and CT brain scans are all suggested in works whose subtext is a world of chaos, disease and explosions that no system can predict or hold together. These aren’t happy paintings, yet they’re perky and earnest. Biogear, with every line a curlicue of tight-wound energy, is a portrait of our world of war and strife surrounded by a great sea of Pepto Bismol. This is a great Philadelphia debut. (Roberta Fallon)