When you're choosing art for the walls of a dimly lit establishment whose business is to inebriate the hipster masses, you've got to make sure the work can hold its own against the booze and the sporadic lighting. Lux Lounge always does a stellar job finding painters who pop and compete well with the bright red walls and the other attention-grabbing décor. The current exhibition is a smart pairing of the tight, illustrative style of recent California transplant Michael Michael Motorcycle with the loose and painterly, unfinished-feeling work of local artist Cordell Cordaro.

Both artists have been enjoying ever-rising success; Cordaro's boldly hued work has been a ubiquitous element around the city's cafes and restaurants for the past few years. He is represented by the chaotic phenomenon that is Artisan Works, as well as galleries in England and Singapore. He's gotten even more attention recently with his design of this year's Corn Hill Festival poster, which has a quartet of swanning society folk, wine glasses in hand, wearing historic houses as hats. Painter, illustrator, and rock poster artist Motorcycle's psychedelic, art nouveau-y work has been part of bunches of exhibitions around the country and he's been featured in various art books and periodicals, including Rock Paper Show and Screenprinting Magazine.

Both painters pay evident and effective homage to styles and influences they love. Though he doesn't claim it, Cordaro's flat, colorful paintings show similarities to Rochester's late darling Ramon Santiago, whose work is also housed in Artisan Works' collection. The former's resembles the latter's style of partially finished, circus-y characters with heavy greasepaint makeup, though Cordaro generally works in sharper angles and a harsher color palette. The artist does name Egon Schiele, Gustav Klimt, and Toulouse Lautrec as among his influences, and a fragment of each of them can be identified in his work. The often emaciated, distorted bodies show off the sickly beauty of Schiele's influence, the colorful patterning is Klimt-y, and the frilliness and night-life opulence-and-vice of Cordaro's work could be the next Moulin Rouge advert.

Cordaro's seven untitled acrylic and ink pieces in the show are fairly representative of all of his work, and range from the profile of a stick-thin pregnant woman holding her bump, to cigar-smoking men in suits with craggy faces, ballerinas with oddly contorted limbs, ladies with gravity-defying hair or explosive hats holding cocktails, and performing musicians. One glance through the prolific list of work on his website, where martinis and makeup abound, is enough to turn onlooking artists chartreuse: row after row of images represent paintings sold.

Motorcycle's work is a visually delightful mesh of art nouveau's heavily outlined, elegantly coiled motifs, with the jarring, citrus-y color palette of a psychedelic cartoon. The artist is "inspired by Victorian advertising, 1930's surrealism, piles of books, hundreds of long play records, and beer," he says on his website. His prints are reproductions of his paintings, and show off masterful portrait skill (for which the bearded artist himself is often the model), and marvelous otherworldly scenes populated by people, animals, and hybrids of both. While Cordaro conveys emotion and fleetingness through choppy, quick brushwork and body gesture, Motorcycle articulates emotion and narratives through extreme detailing, empathy-inducing facial expressions, and setting.

In "A God," or, "the luscious-lipped Jesus," as a friend of mine dubbed it, a bearded man with a perfectly curling mustache is positioned in profile between a city with ribbon-smoke pouring from stacks and the peaks of pink, bubbly mountains. His skyward expression is of blank wonder, and his headdress is a giant, jewel-like butterfly. In another work, a queen rides a huge seahorse in a forest of enormous and colorful blossoms. In yet another, a winged man in a suit carries a torch and flees from blazing twin towers in the distance. Explosions, vibrating color, and heavy diagonals add to the feeling of urgency. Two of Motorcycle's fascinations, love and the effects of the industrial revolution, are seen in many of the narratives, where men and women literally pour the contents of their hearts out to one another, or silent battles between nature and industry rage.

The works are well matched to the setting: the alcoholic content of Cordaro's work rivals that of the bar-going viewers, and the drinking-smoking-strutting characters are appropriate for a nightlife setting. The mythy worlds of Michael Michael Motorcycle's work give you somewhere to escape if your date is boring you to tears.

Cordell Cordaro and Michael Michael Motorcycle

Ongoing

Lux Lounge, 666 South Ave.

232-9030, lux666.com/art

Monday-Thursday 5 p.m.-2 a.m., Friday 4:30 p.m.-2 a.m., Saturday-Sunday 9 p.m.-2 a.m.