Tala Madani’s paintings can be repulsive. And witty, absurd and sinister, often all at once. This discordant medley of attributes is amplified by Madani’s virtuosic style that borders on the cartoonish. A few facile brushstrokes and a spray of the airbrush is all Madani seems to need to create her tableaux depicting the misdeeds of men. In recent years, the gross-out humor of Madani’s canvases has frequently tipped into the realm of the perverse—like with the man milking his own enormous penis that has curled above his body (O, 2015), or a grizzled Santa Claus impersonator urinating through a hole in a gift-wrapped box onto a Christmas tree while a baby in a crib is looking on in horror (Tree, 2015). Madani doesn’t hesitate to embarrass her cast of chubby man-children, or her viewers. There’s urination, masturbation, defecation, brutality, torture, interrogation, and intimations of suicide and even potential rape, all mixed together in a way that somehow remains humorous—which troubles us with the questions of how and why.

In her recent paintings, many of which are see in “First Light” at the MIT List Visual Arts Center, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, there’s a new character: the smiley face (or “Smiley”), which Forrest Gump viewers know dates to the early 1960s when it became a symbol of happy-hippie culture. The hapless vapidity of the symbol has been rescued somewhat from clichéd hippie-dom in the form of emojis today, but in Madani’s hands, Smiley’s banality is linked with evil, as in Projections (2015), which depicts three men holding projectors that shine smiley faces down onto a cast of forlorn inmates. In the similar-looking Sainted, four smiley-faced but shadowy men on an upper floor, projecting smiley icons over the heads of five naked detainees seated below, turning the face into a cruelly ironic halo in what looks to be a situation of abusive captivity. Going further into the realm of torture is Love Doctor (2015), which shows Smiley in a lab coat with a pair of scissors in hand, ready to remove a man’s nose (Smiley himself has only eyes and a mouth). Levity prevails occasionally, as in an untitled 2015 work where the smiley faces float across a darkened grid and begin to resemble calligraphy, or as if illustrating some pun about “free-floating signifiers.”