Decades after Pop Art’s party balloons deflated, certain artists it launched remain relevant. For instance, the monumental whimsy of Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen continues to hold air. So it’s clear there can be more to an artist’s oeuvre than whatever fashion may have given it a push. That’s the case with Ellen Frances Tuchman’s mixed-media paintings: kitsch has lost its cute, but her manic riffs on popular culture, slang and idiom reserve a place for themselves.

This well-established body of work, plus her more recent series of quill paintings (quills being coiled strips of tinted paper that are pinched and placed to fashion seemingly abstract gradients of color) comprise her third solo exhibition at PanAmerican ArtProjects, Out of My Mind, through November 25.

An explanation of terms may be in order. In discussing art media, the word “painting” has come to include works executed with unconventional pigments or other materials, and not strictly in two dimensions (Anselm Kiefer’s thick paintings that incorporate sand, ash or lead foil illustrate this). The qualifier “mixed media” implies even more ingredients, so by weight or volume, Tuchman’s work may very well be composed of a higher percentage of paper, beads, sequins, cabochons, buttons, polymer clay and miscellaneous ephemera than of anything applied with a brush. And, as for the brush, Tuchman may apply not just acrylic but also eye shadow and nail polish. Still, she calls them paintings.

In general, her work has its roots in the textile arts she studied at UCLA and California College of the Arts but has evolved into two distinct styles. The first she describes as narrative pieces, the body of work for which she’s best known: complex constructions in which a barrage of vintage paper ephemera, found objects and trinkets (matchbooks, postcards, comic books, advertisements, souvenirs, coins and toys) snap to a frenetic grid she has drawn, colored, beaded and buttoned on large sheets of translucent mylar.

Mr. Lucky (2008–2009)

Before one gives her the benefit of the doubt and assumes the show title refers solely to her creative productivity, Tuchman will set the record straight. “Clearly, I am slightly insane and the obsessive details in my work manifest a need for reason and order, but with humor and a light touch,” the gallery’s web site quotes her. “Otherwise, life becomes much too grim.”

This tongue-in-cheek self-assessment might implant the mental picture of the artist bent over her work, muttering away in her studio, desperately trying to ignore outside her walls a world gone wacko. But look closely enough and it becomes apparent hers is not so much insanity as it is savant. Like Dustin Hoffman’s Raymond in the film, “Rain Man,” Tuchman rapid-fire free associates at the drop of a hackneyed phrase.

Humor is how she rolls. Sometimes the juggernaut is based on a linguistic concept. For instance, someone may have mentioned in passing the word, “luck,” Tuchman’s ears perked up and when the dust cleared, Mr. Lucky (2008–2009) was left standing; a roughly five-foot-by-three-foot matrix of objects bearing phrases such as, “Lucky in Love,” “Lucky Match,” “Lucky Man,” “Lucky Boy,” “Lucky Dog,” “Lucky Lindy,” “Lucky Louie,” “Lucky Luke,” “Lucky Strike,” “Lucky Stiff” and “Get Lucky;” in the form of gambling chips, tokens, album and book covers, 45-rpm vinyl records and product packaging. Best of all here is an inside joke for older folk, a New York City police mugshot of an unnamed co-conspirator, Prohibition-era mob boss Lucky Luciano.

But more often Tuchman’s explosive rants are simultaneously verbal and visual. Three from one series, On My Mind: Boogie Woogie, Googie and Noogie (2007–2009), cover nearly 45 square feet of gallery wall with all kinds of brain matter: from nineteenth-century phrenology charts to an X-ray of Homer Simpson’s walnut-size cerebrum.

191.9 (Brain Tumor) (2009) Paper quills on duratrans 19 x 35 inches

In contrast to these chunky narrative pieces are her quill paintings, mostly delicate meditations on color and texture which, if they didn’t share those coils of colored paper with the narrative pieces, they might appear to have been done by another artist entirely. The minimal Loves Me Loves Me Not (2009) belongs in a survey of contemporary color field painting. The five that bear number titles are strikingly poignant, unfortunately elegant abstractions based on the brain scans of individuals with pathologies like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases.

As with Oldenburg, there’s never been any doubt that Tuchman believes art can, perish the thought, have a sense of humor. That she could also turn the clinical record of such a cataclysmic human event into an object of such beauty is indicative of an even more remarkably buoyant worldview.