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The economy’s dead, our environment is on the verge of collapse, and responsible citizens everywhere are struggling to conserve in order to survive. Which is exactly why Trudy Bensons luridly maximalist new show, “Space Jam,” is such a visceral, flippant punch to the gut. Large canvases explode a faux-naif wonderland — part Philip Guston, part sloppy ‘zine comic — using enough paint to cover a very large house. Reproductions of these images don’t do justice to the sheer amount of pigment that Benson has loaded on here: slathered is really the only appropriate verb.

I imagine her working with a trowel. Or a shovel. Shaky rainbows of color stick out centimeters from the canvas. While the palette includes lighthearted neons, streaks of thick, indelicate oil pigment give the canvases a brutal heft, even if the subject matter reads like an abstract riff on Saturday morning cartoons. Benson applies paint the way most people smear cream cheese on a bagel.

There’s probably something cerebral to utter here about the physicality of painting, or about how the density of pigment injects a sculptural edge to an otherwise flat canvas. But how highbrow do we really want to get with a show that shares its name with a 1996 film co-starring Michael Jordan and Bugs Bunny? (My scribbled gallery notes read: “Mustard / ketchup / turd of toothpaste / melted crayons.”) It’s easy to scoff at these paintings — they seem amateurish at first glance, and casually hip. From the opening night crowd, I wouldn’t be surprised if Ms. Benson is a youngish, flannel-wearing denizen of Bushwick, Brooklyn. But get over the knee-jerk cynicism, and you’ll start to appreciate these weird abstract pieces for their colors, their sense of line and shape, and yes, the sculptural physicality of that oil-paint-as-cream-cheese aesthetic.

The same can’t be said of Kent Dorn, who has three smaller canvases in the back room of Freight + Volume. These figurative works evince the same love for paint overload, but in a way that’s far more grotesque and purposefully ugly — a bit like a kitschy picture that may be hanging on someone’s grandma’s wall. In hell.