Paul Kostabi's paintings have the worked-over look of pictures meant to be worlds in themselves, that grab the eye like a stranger grabbing your lapels. They're paintings that love paint: its infinite variability, its stubbornness, its musicality; the energy it emits in contact with itself; the emotions it unlocks, even when it looks as random as spit and drool, as the record of the passing hand. Some of Kostabi's most complicated works contain hard notes and calculated echoes of other art, in the way an aquarium holds drifting particles of sand and exotic fish, looking less like quotations than fragments seen through thick glass or distorting filters; he has an arresting knack for giving the deliberate and circumscribed the spontaneous look of happy accident, and vice-versa. Lubricity, fecundation, frazzled physiognomies, twisted bodies, podlike organisms bursting into weird effulgence—these are some recurring apparitions that inhabit Kostabi's imaginary spaces, sculpted in jittery lines that crackle like electrified threads. Like the Catalan artist Zush, Kostabi animates unidentifiable objects as if they had been surgically extracted from the viewer's own insides, complete with bits of hair and sperm and viscera. His people are idiograms of bewilderment and panic. In the landscapes of his personal planet, everything from the sky to the telephone looks prodded, pinched, goosed, galvanized, or otherwise distressed, hyperstimulated, overdosed, or happy for suspicious reasons. This is a world where matter itself can morph from voluptuousness to abjection on a dime, though the equanimity, often deadpan frankness, with which Kostabi presents it suggests a less dramatic binary between contentment and mortification, where exaltation is a tad grandiose for what usually happens in a day and horror has the momentary shock of a joy buzzer. His work deflates the monumental anxiety that neo-Expressionism went to the bank on, brings us back to earth. His paintings can be read in multiple ways, crowded with diverse and divisive visual codes, resistant to single, unifying interpretation; attaching a narrative to them would distract from their immediacy as images. The one, distant connection to narrative they suggest is a likeness to acrostics, rebuses, puzzles. Moreover, puzzles without a "correct" solution, questions that stay open instead of prompting any answer. Kostabi's most frequent and prehensible subject is the face, most often the sharp, economically delineated clench of expressions that might be inked on a napkin or jotted in a notebook. But his faces are also enclosures, masks, fences drawn around cloudbursts and hurricanes of brushstrokes and colors, mood diagrams sometimes at odds with the dramas going on inside them, or simply sketched over a picture plane to which their relation is strictly adhesive, signs carved into other signs, in the familiar, drizzled pastiche of the modern image-world. The artist Kostabi seems to have most affinity with is Dubuffet—they share an idea of the painting as a model universe, a place where the medium illustrates how we see along with what we see. It's the condition of urban, contemporary humanity never to see one thing in isolation, but, invariably, in relation to other things—and things, in the general sense that includes concepts, words, and emotions as well as tangible objects, continually slip in and out of the categorical boundaries our rational habits draw around them. It makes perceptual sense that Kostabi layers pictograms and arrows and tiny plastic animals on nominally figural paintings that also contain words and shreds of clashing iconography, some of it straight quotation from, for instance, Mark Kostabi, or parodying Schnabel, Haring, and other Pantheonic art world brand names; these collisions of styles, imagery, and volumes are how we see the world now. Kostabi's work doesn't level the relative value of these particular paintings' contents, but interrupts the automatic process of "recognizing" both the fragment and its originator's hierarchical position in the art pecking order. Overt quotation doesn't occupy much of this artist's energy, but it is significant for its statement about "the art commodity" and the market system's creepy ability to turn artworks into logos. Of course, one strategy many contemporary artists have taken to become audible above the prevailing drone is to make blocky, instantly assimilated work, often using techniques of advertising; but painting, qua painting, has become an ever more conflicted and demanding way of making art, a practice that drags the anchor of its own history along, like opera—it isn't completely possible to do it differently than it's ever been done, though it is still possible to do it with more-than-ordinary grace. In this connection, the viewer should look past the facets of Kostabi's paintings that shout or signal from a distance. They definitely "hail" us from far off, but their complex pleasures of texture, line, and overall intricacy need more time and a heightened state of attention than signage art that only asks for a glance and tells you everything in one word. Many of Paul Kostabi's iconographic mannerisms have been borrowed or unconsciously mimicked by other, slightly younger artists, which makes a lot of Kostabi's early work superficially seem related to painting that came along later; like Dubuffet vis-a-vis art brut, Kostabi has the lucky misfortune to have imitators and epigones. But Kostabi's art isn't reducible to a style, per se—in fact, he uses many styles, as freely as colors, and the attraction of his work has a lot to do with the surprising range of aesthetic vocabularies he makes fluid use of, with a leavening sense of humor that links his art to the cosmic whimsy of such disparate, sublimely raunchy comedians as Jack Smith, R. Crumb, and Paul Thek.
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