WHEN ONE FIRST walks into the Latin American Club, Adam Connelly's paintings look like abstract grids of light and color remotely reminiscent of Mondrian's Composition with Gray and Light Brown. A second glance reveals the figures veiled by these abstractions: women posed on all fours or engaged in various sex acts. Connelly downloads pornographic pictures from the Internet and manipulates them until the digital pixels that make up the images overwhelm their content. He then paints the pixels, but not the figures, as individual colors, which results in close studies of the material properties of digital images through paint. Despite their obvious debt to new media, Connelly's pictures are surprisingly painterly. From up close they appear rich in texture and reveal subtle juxtapositions of color. But he's clearly interested in more than paint; his pictures are titillating. Whereas pornography hung on the wall as such would be confrontational (and would disturb the casual social milieu of a bar like the Latin American), the abstraction produced by Connelly's reproductions provides a distance from their subject matter that allows them to be enjoyed as if they weren't pornographic. Much like Kurtis Blow sings "don't do it" on "White Lines" and then proceeds with his encomium to cocaine, Connelly's distortions serve as a censor that (paradoxically) enables the pictures to be enjoyed in their obscenity. At the same time, Connelly's close attention to the images' pixelation reveals truths about the enjoyment of digital porn. His paintings articulate an instrumental (and perhaps specifically misogynist) fantasy of sex objects reduced not merely to body parts but furthermore to objects of pure illusion – as a stimulus only to the eye and the mind – which he captures in his titles, such as zuztu030.jpg, 31.jpg, and 05.jpg. He doesn't paint women; he paints digital files. He presents the digital screen as an object of desire, a surrogate for the pleasures of the flesh, and a fetishistic defense against the vulnerabilities they entail – as if to say not "you can look but don't touch," but rather "you can look and don't have to touch." Sun.-Thurs., 6 p.m.-2 a.m.; Fri., 5 p.m.-2 a.m.; Sat., 4 p.m.-2 a.m., 3286 22nd St., S.F. (415) 647-2732. (Clark Buckner)