Kindling the spirits

Glenn Brown, “God Speed to a Great Astronaut,” 2007

Doomed cities, disembodied figures, and anime zombies pop up in three artists’ new work

By Jeffrey Cyphers Wright

Art has been haunted from the get-go. Consider its origins: a bunch of guys, together in spooky caves, acting all serious and painting bison to appease the gods. Ever since, we’ve looked back to previous work to keep the spirits alive.

Thoroughly churning up the spirits, Glenn Brown at Gagosian begins each painting in response to a prior work, usually from art history. These paeans to the past are then subverted in their re-compositions through riotous colors and abstract detail. This detailed brushwork twists, squirms and writhes like the convection of heat waves or convolutions of Venetian glass. Rounded and coiled, stretched and distorted, they imply motion and deny depth, thereby disembodying the spectral figures they make up.

“God Speed to a Great Astronaut” is the anachronistic title given to a green wraith suspended in ether. Swaths of moiling moiré billow about. This central figure is composed of numerous, swirling brushstrokes. Stuck together like seething eels, passages become eyeballs, apertures and beasts. A cherub emerges from the maze as a couple of dark marks on a burgundy smear become a devoted face. A frothy coif tops it off. The resulting angel supports the “astronaut,” referencing a religious depiction of ascension. Matching its mate, another cherub-blob hoists a sumptuous robe.

Brown’s appropriations have become armatures — they support a bold new visual language that fuses abstraction and figuration. And, as I overheard one of the gallerists admiringly quip, they are an “entertainment.”

Entertainment also figures into the scenes of Pompeii by Antonio Petracca at Kim Foster Gallery. Inspired by frescoes in the ancient, doomed city, Petracca embeds contemporary shards into the tableaux. The sophisticated compositions and perspectives of the original First Century B.C. frescoes are astounding and the artist pays homage in a beautiful tribute. Oblique angles and corners achieve trompe l’oeil effects, as the paintings seem to follow around you.

In “Pompeii Mural Tagged,” a weathered poster for the Soprano’s cookbook is stuck on a fresco, mimicking the deterioration of the ancient art. Rough areas become abstract plays of light, like water on a pool bottom. Cracks, leeching and flaking are rendered with intense subtlety. Velvet rhythms sway.

“Sleep with the Fishes,” is scrawled under a Venus on the half-shell in another painting, conflating time and triggering a frisson of dislocation. The juxtaposition makes an ironic comment about our ongoing negative stereotypes of Italians. Running diagonally, a grass-lined walk leads to a black doorway. The surface of the path, a mauve and gray dissolve, dances into the darkness. It is so finely painted that a haze hovers overall — a madly seductive, faint blur. Magically, Petracca’s work itself, now and then hovers between then and now.

Where the future dwells is where the Japanese artist known as Mr. takes us at Lehmann Maupin. In his depictions of youths as anime icons, he invites inquiry into what is inside the heads of the next generation.

Mr. asks this question literally with his giant girl’s head sculpture. Moving around from the front, the chipper countenance belies emptiness. Looking into an open door at the back of the girl’s head we see small, cheap toys and figures laid out in rows. The big head is full of little bits. It is programmed to be cute and consumed — to be cheery and two-dimensional.

Expanding the tone, humor and eroticism inform a series of four vertical paintings. In the “manga” tradition, an adolescent girl poses in a black and white maid’s costume against flat lavender. The vocabulary of Japanese pop images is reanimated by Mr.’s color, scale and drafting skill.

In “Your Girls,” an urban landscape stretches out: a monochromatic backdrop to the high-key, doll-faced subjects. As the familiar tropes of anime are investigated and recontextualized, Mr.’s cute kids can become disturbing reminders of empty-headed culture — zombies with big eyes.