Susan, at Algus Greenspon, is Mathew Cerletty’s fifth solo show in NYC, and his first since 2007.  From a heterogeneous history of technically proficient illustration, curious gender-bending portraits, and hollow text paintings, Susan delivers the photogenic Mathew Cerletty as a cool, judicious photorealist primarily interested in examining devitalized interiors.

Mathew Cerletty at the opening of "Susan," November 5th, 2011

Quiet Grace is an exquisite, forensic study of light dispersion and perspective.  White daylight beams through illusionistically flat glass panes and mingles with the fresh paint drying on the walls; streaks appear on the adjoining jamb, as if the paint there is still half dry.  Light merges with paint, both in the picture and on the surface.  Quiet Grace is like Cerletty’s Red Studio.  Incidentally, red is the only hue that does not explicitly appear in this painting.

Mathew Cerletty, "Quiet Grace," 2011

Daylight (impossible without its long, red wavelength) washes across the crinkled drop cloth; base shadows articulate these creases, making them appear as cracks in the floor or roots growing from beneath the wood bureau.  Cracks, roots, or wrinkles: either way, this is the only expanse of space that isn’t smooth and flat.

Matisse, "The Red Studio," 1911 (Looking at it now, I realize Maurizio Cattelan's "All" is more Red Studio than Cerletty's "Quiet Grace."

On the other hand, we have something defiantly flat, as flat as the glass windows behind it.  The electric blue sweater draped over a glossy black chair succumbs to gravity but otherwise refuses material dynamics.  Nestled somewhere on its surface are two paint sample swatches.  Their horizontal slabs echo the slats on the chair and the ladder.  The shiny ladder reflects the luminous walls around it, peach-colored, like the sides of brick buildings during a summer sunset.  The ladder’s feet – safety orange – seem to match the orange on the paint roller to its right.  Lids of the paint cans reflect the light in the glass panes, as well as some details that don’t appear elsewhere.  The lone drawer in the bureau extends forward, as if satisfying a viewer’s urge to tug on the tromple l’oeil knob handles.  Steered by Cerletty’s pictorial engineering, a viewer’s gaze ricochets around the painting, like a particle of orange light.

Ring Bearer

Cerletty commits again to primary color interactions in Untitled, which seems to reprise Winkie’s, a 2010 painting included in a group show curated by Timothy Hull and Lumi Tan at Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery last summer.  It also reminds me of his mostly faithful yet marginally expansive reproduction of Wire’s 154 album cover (now relegated to fashion boutique commonplace).

Mathew Cerletty, "Winkie's," 2010

In Untitled,  Cerletty populates the black discs of Winkie’s with images that seem to represent 19th century Orientalist scenes.  If that’s his goal, then maybe the wavy appendage – here, a coatrack – stands in for the winding python in Jean-Leon Gerome’s flagship painting of this genre, The Snake Charmer.  In any case, the black discs serve as windows to the other side of the world, even if that world is just a picture.  Untameable fissures agitate the dusty terrain in these outdoor spaces, not unlike the wrinkled drop cloth in Quiet Grace.

Mathew Cerletty, "Untitled," 2011

The most delightfully strange painting here is Ikea, in which the vertical thrust is reanimated by an upwardly expanding triangular burst.  Our eyes climb up alongside a narrow cabinet that is so slim that it seems useless, and then meet a fork where the two daisies diverge in their translucent vase.  This diverging trajectory culminates in the horizontal, segmented capstone – an image of a key.  Meanwhile, the cabinet supports two lazily leaning golf clubs and a stamped, but unaddressed envelope.  Is it the palette that makes me queasy?  Is it the compressed clutter?  Is it the sterile leisure of this sliver of interior decoration?  Is it being reminded about the dissolution of the American middle class?  Here, there’s no hole in the bucket, but there is a fly in the ointment.

Listen: Wire – I Am the Fly

Artwalk NY Co-chairs Richard Gere and Carey Lowell (from WireImage)

Last night at Artwalk NY, the annual benefit gala for the Coalition for the Homeless, co-chair Richard Gere addressed attendees seated for the live auction.

“Welcome to all of you,” he said.  “Especially the 1%.”

Against the applause, my stomach turned.  Mr. Gere has co-chaired the philanthropic event for six years, demonstrating a high level of commitment.  His comment was probably an intended joke, or maybe a segment of the equation that connects wealthy philanthropists with vulnerable communities of people, such as the homeless.  We need their money, obviously.  -And regrettably.

His “shout-out” evinced a devastating abandonment of the big picture.  Spoken on the same day of Bloomberg’s Blitzkrieg of Zuccotti Park, his address appeared at best, ironic.  At worst, his words sounded callous, goading, and smug.  To thank donors, generosity, or sharing would resonate more warmly than fractiously championing “the 1%,” a title now synonymous with predators, greed, and selfishness.

As an artist, I feel honored each time I’m invited to donate artwork to this successful charity event.  (Artwalk NYframes my work, hangs it with well-considered placement, and rewards me with a generous invitation to the event.)  It has raised millions of dollars for housing, food, counseling, training, and children.  So thank God for Artwalk!  But would we need it if our country had publicly-funded, venerable programs to prevent homelessness?  Imagine what we could accomplish with effective drug abuse intervention, accessible education, affordable housing, and of course, universal health care.  Instead, we get Tea Party-powered “austerity” and politicians pledging to never raise taxes on those who make enough money to have a tax responsibility.  Hence, Gere’s statement made me feel mixed up in something I shouldn’t be.

Likewise, thank God for Occupy Wall Street!  It has enlightened minds worldwide about the imminent economic catastrophe looming at the end of the currently prevailing conditions.  But would we need it if our country chose people over profits, and not the opposite?  Our brutal concentration of wealth is inextricable from the major problems we face.  If we deterred the most destructive criminals in our country – including but not limited to Wall Street fraudsters – our economy could be more stable.  Tent villages in Zuccotti Park wouldn’t be a chilling portent of a worst-case scenario for the 99%.

Unplugged, Rebooted

Horror Hospital Unplugged is the graphic novel created by artist Keith Mayerson and writer Dennis Cooper.  Juno Books published it over ten years ago, and Harper Perennial republished it this year.

Unplugged, Rebooted

The story covers a fledgling Hollywood band and its frontman, Trevor Machine, who in real life might have envied Darby Crash or aged into G.G. Allin.   The band, cannily named after an obscure 70s zombie film of 1973, emerges on the zine scene as a queer touchstone and on the glam atlas as the next big thing, attracting even the Geffen Records eponymous Powerman.  However, it’s the band’s only straight member who connects Trevor with his tragic love, Tim.  Disdained by Trevor’s bandmates as a “clone,” Tim is relatively secure in his sexuality.  With this leverage, he challenges Trevor to locate his creative engines and then to admit the indomitable onset of LOVE.  Meanwhile, the band’s surge of attention, fueled by a disingenuous collaboration with Courtney Love, and monitored by the ghost of River Phoenix, culminates on the night that Trevor learns the hardest lesson of his short life.

Unplugged, Rebooted

Keith Mayerson handles the tumultous arc by wrangling several species of drawing styles, including hallucinatory symbolism; and effervescent, plastic manga; and syndicated illustration, like a hazy Jack Kirby flashback.  No page feels laborious or over-researched; instead, Keith conveys decisive urgency and capitalizes on his existing familiarity with these styles.  -Or, as the gallery spins it: “if Antonin Artaud and Keith Haring took the wrong drugs and collaborated on a kids cartoon show.”

Sympathy

Things keep moving.  As the story develops, Keith nimbly leaps from panel-based sequence to sprawling splash pages teeming with stream-of-conscious maps and vignettes.  He handles a night at The Viper Room, where River Phoenix famously overdosed – in real life and in this story – as a seat-assigned index of celebrities, wherein the stars appear as terriers.  A later page, anchored by an all-seeing sun, branches out into a galaxy, with each planet occupied by a cast member.

Hearts Beating Together

Unplugged, Rebooted

And Keith brings the inside to the outside.  This unusual ability is what pushes his Horror Hospital Unplugged drawings beyond the service-based conventions of illustration and into the limitless anarchy of real art.  Keith doesn’t just “show” what happens, he intimates what happens.  Principal and peripheral characters morph and transform into horrific beasts, often in tandem with predatorial surges.  During the feverish heights of sex and drugs, and through the coupling (and tripling) of warm bodies, Keith’s reductive, permissive curlicues and arabesque contours violently fracture and bleed into streaky, desperate scrawling.  Figures dissolve into skeletal cinders, as if life is incompatible with these indulgences.  But it’s not pleasure, per se, that annihilates corporeal functionality.  For example, the sweet sex scene between Tim and Trevor is cosmic, a flight through zip-a-tone filler into the rabbit-hole sublime.  Sex doesn’t equal death; but imbalanced rapacity kills.  Chicken hawks kill.  Drugging someone kills.  Commercialism kills. Pollution kills.  Exploitation kills.

Unplugged, Rebooted

Unplugged, Rebooted

Unplugged, Rebooted

The current show at Derek Eller Gallery is an unprecedented opportunity to see Keith’s visionary drawings in the flesh.  On varied, provisional sheets of paper and board, the drawings are pinned to the walls, freely accessible and available (or vulnerable) to tactile appeal.  We can see Keith’s swift composition with non-photo blue pencil, his correction with masking tape, and the margin notes with which he advises himself.  He lets his handiwork freak-flag fly high.  This informal preference is terrific, as it matches the  lo-fi, punk resistance to preciousness we find in the drawings (and their characters).  (WWTMD*?)  On the other hand, some drawings are precariously dangling off the wall; one strong autumn wind might send them to the floor.  Thus, superficially, they are quite underdressed.  More importantly: Keith Mayerson is a great artist.  All of his work now demands dignity (and protection), despite any unassuming moments from the past.

Yet, I think the Keith Mayerson of Horror Hospital leaves conservation to conservators.  Like rock gods, these drawings were made to live fast.  Archival consternation would just slow them down.  This show restages the immediate gratification that Keith magically harnessed as a virtue, and we should enjoy that while we can.

*What Would Trevor Machine Do?

Maurizio Cattelan: "All" at the Guggenheim

All, the Maurizio Cattelan retrospective at the Guggenheim, opened last night.*  In All, Cattelan’s sculptures, photos, and recreated performances are suspended from an impressive rigging apparatus above the rotunda.  All reminds me of Dorothy’s tornado hallucinations in The Wizard of Oz or Tom Cruise suspended in Mission Impossible.

Maurizio Cattelan: "All" at the Guggenheim

More absurd would be footage of animals being rescued from floods, hoisted by helicopters and carried off and away from the disaster.  And much darker than these, one might recall the hideous images of burned, mutilated Americans hanging from a bridge in Fallujah.

Maurizio Cattelan: "All" at the Guggenheim

This isn’t the only morbid  coincidence relating Maurizio Cattelan’s comic oeuvre with the real world.  Novecento/ Ballad for Trotsky, 1996, the hanging horse, could be replaced by the carriage horse that died two weeks ago in midtown, an inevitable casualty of an inhumane tourist gimmick that profits from overworking animals in inclement conditions.  Now we can zoom in on Cattelan’s Bidibidobidiboo, 1996, a.k.a. the “Squirrel Suicide,” hanging nearby.

Maurizio Cattelan: "All" at the Guggenheim

Maurizio Cattelan: "All" at the Guggenheim

And at the top of Cattelan’s super mobile are Cattelan’s upside-down NYPD officers, only feet away from a male mannequin duct-taped to a wall, and yards away from Cattelan’s iconic, supplicant Hitler, Him, 2001.  It’s a timely alignment for this tumultuous autumn, during which many Facebook walls scroll images and videos of police across the country beating Occupy protestors – most recently and notoriously the reckless Oakland cop who lobbed an explosive device directly at protestors aiding the critically injured Scott Olsen.  “Thugs!” some viewers gasp. “Nazis!”

Maurizio Cattelan: "All" at the Guggenheim

Then again, that duct-taped mannequin is a recreation of A Perfect Day, 1999, for which Cattelan taped up dealer Massimo de Carlo in his Milan gallery for a day.  Given that de Carlo would be among the 1%, the piece begins to look different.  Isn’t this what we’d like to do to a Wall Street CEO?  Hanging beneath that is the blown up newspaper photo of Italian Prime Minister Aldo Mori, who was murdered by  the Red Brigades in 1978.  Here, Cattelan has scribbled over the photo, converting the Communist emblem star over Mori’s head into a shooting Star of Bethlehem.  Cattelan seems to address violent disorder from all sides of power relations; Left and Right, Above and Below.  Just ask his mannequin of Pope John Paul in La Nona Ora, toppled by a stray (or carefully aimed) meteorite (Straight Outta Bethlehem?).  Cattelan’s multilateral criticism is often lightened by humor, yet it’s poignant when pointed.  Perhaps this democratic awareness is behind the title of his retrospective.

Maurizio Cattelan at his Guggenheim Opening

Maurizio Cattelan: "All" at the Guggenheim

"Come at me, bro!"

Maurizio Cattelan: "All" at the Guggenheim

Maurizio Cattelan: "All" at the Guggenheim

*Thank you, Cindy, for the invitation!