The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Quirky show tackles nature and culture
“The Mysterious World” as it’s envisioned by the four artists in this group show at Buckhead’s Tew Galleries is less a curated group show than a showcase for a stable of gallery artists. But the exhibition nevertheless yields some notable riches.
The assembled works by Melissa Sims, Charles Keiger, Mario Soria and Steven Moors are nutty, surreal, occasionally disconcerting, but also suggest meatier stuff, like climate change — or at least an imperiled nature — adolescent angst and the dark side of American pop culture. It’s more than just weird for weird’s sake.
Take longtime Atlanta surrealist Charles Keiger who offers his usual
magical realism with a sidecar of Dixie. His focus in the exquisite paintings he has created for “The Mysterious World” is a natural world that feels certifiably out of whack. A chipmunk hunkers daintily on a fallen log against a voluptuously post-apocalyptic Eden; in “The Cove (Blue Titmouse)” a bird sits on a levitating branch in a forest clearing. These critters are rendered with charm and wit, but there is something precarious in their circumstance that seems to speak to issues beyond the borders of Keiger’s creepy Giorgio de Chirico backdrops where every hillside and body of water looks sculpted from foam core. In the past, a kind of Southern gothic quirk animated Keiger’s work, but this go-around something more sinister flickers at the edges.
Spanish artist Mario Soria seems similarly fixated on a blend of comic uneasiness in his portraits of young folk contending with a hormonal-meets-metaphysical whirl. In “Young Lady Growing Pains,” the lady in question sports three ears. Awkward! And in “The Blues” a pretty ginger lass weeps fat tears from all three of her eyeballs. In Soria’s feverish imagination, inner angst is expressed in outer mutations and even the most stylish among us suffer circumstances like a head that’s flip-flopped on the stem of a lady’s neck. And that’s just the paintings. Like a TV host winking at his audience as he breaks the fourth wall, Soria concentrates equal artistic attention on the frames that surround his subjects. Several feature cheap toys encrusting the frame like barnacles.
Melissa Sims has long trafficked in her own form of nostalgia, channeling a world of cowboys, funny papers girl reporters, superheroes and other brightly colored Americana. She returns to some of that slightly goosed nostalgia in several of the works here, many of which are beginning to look a little toothless. But she’s also pursuing a much more interesting exhumation of the past in her paintings that examine the dark side of ’60s and ’70s kitsch: dead-eyed kids with Margaret Keane expressions dancing like pretty zombies to a record player at their feet in “The New Craze.” But the most unnerving work has to be the bad trip fantasia “Let Your Peace Flow, like a Mountain Stream” in which a Russ Berrie & Company (maker of trolls and Sillisculpt) figure adopts a Nixon gesture of peace against a backdrop of fake paint-by-numbers nature, Wayne White typography and a telegenic rainbow.
Sims taps into a streak of consumerist sentimentality that reduces political protest, youthful rebellion and nature to gaudy rainbows and peace sign jewelry so saccharine and fake you want to #gag.
New York-based Steven Moors is new to Tew, but like Sims, he traffics in American pop culture iconography: flying saucers, Mickey Mouse, ’50s housewives in bullet bras. His digital drawings, sketched on an ipad, are then printed onto a vellum-like etching paper that gives his works a delicate blueprint-like quality. Each work is a crazed collision of pop culture references. In “Untitled: Big Ship, Small Horse, Pointing Man,” there is a flying saucer, Pegasus, an Age of Sail brigantine, midcentury modern furniture and details of woodgrain and upholstery fabric that give his work a mix of the organic and the Populuxe, and the crazed energy of a Richard Hamilton collage.