Take one beautiful schoolboy. Clone genetically numerous times and stuff each counterfeit with a distinctly obnoxious, insolent, and unstable personality, based on that bastard you hated in eighth grade who used to lob spitballs into the back of your head during math class. Add a pinch of violence, a squirt of incest, and a hint of dismemberment. Whip on high-speed in your Adobe blender until perfectly seamless. Pour digital paste onto laminated photo paper and serve rare.

Anthony Goicolea's new offering at Rare Gallery serves up this formula piping hot. Riffing on the theme of "self-love vs. self-hate", Goicolea's revamped definition of self-portraiture adopts Cindy Sherman's sense of staged reality and character assassination, but tweaks it with fizzy Photoshop fantasy. Where Sherman masks herself in the guise of, say, your wonky Aunty Edna, the soccer-mom/real estate broker from Pasadena, Goicolea appears as a kaleidoscopic nightmarish army of Ritalin riddled bullies from an all-boys private junior high school. His panoramic, large-scale photographs of himself in duplication resemble nothing so much as the surreal scene in Being John Malkovich (1999) when Malkovich enters his own brain to find himself on the battleground of the ego.

Goicolea has been at this project for almost two years now, but the Rare show marks the artist's arrival at a mature style. In Floaters, his absolute control of the dynamic aesthetic conditions found underwater dissolves any residue doubt of his technical mastery of the digital medium. The cinematic scope of narrative in pieces such as Before Dawn and Cannibals avoids the pitfalls faced by so many artists who succumb to the tendency to let visual software dictate the final appearance and meaning of the work.

The arrival of this artist to the field could not have been timed more perfectly. His body of work, known as the Detention series (a follow up to his past series You and What Army), picks up the threads of debate regarding the cultural ethics of human cloning and its potential disasters. Playing both sides of the issue simultaneously, Goicolea's yin-yang ginseng soup of contradiction goes down like a Spike Jonze music video or an Alex Garland novel: visually tasty, caustically poisonous and impossibly absorbing.