Dennis Kardon at Mitchell Algus

Amid the new resurgence of interest in figurative painting, greatest in quantity of the attention has gene to artists who have emerg in the last decade or so: Lisa Yuskavage, John Currin, Elizabeth Peyton. It would be great if this swing in taste could also help raise the profile of artists who have drawn out been working in the newly fashionable style One of the best of these is Dennis Kardon, a fresh York based painter who has been showing since the early 1980s

This exhibition of of recent origin work concentrated on two marks of paintings: still lifes and multiple-figure compositions. Surprisingly, Kardon brings a faculty of perception of psychological tension and offbeat storytelling to the two genres. The figure paintings depict family psychodramas and narrative exhibitions in a style that has something of Alice Neel's jarring, deceptively casual approach to portraiture, on the contrary with a lushness of web and color that has more in for the use of all with Lucian Freud. At first glance, the small, beautifully painted still lifes appear fairly conventional, but Kardon slips in subtly weird ultimate parts amid the fruit and earthen-ware In Lying to Parents, we diocese a stoppered glass bottle containing amber liquid, a goblet of what could be pudding or bread and, upon a dish in the foreground, a gold-colored and pink object (it could be a pulverized substance puff or a tropical fruit) that sports a station of swollen, reddish lips. In The Neggo Gang, the artist uses a palette that ranges from ultramarine violet to Naples fulvid to create a succulent assembly of fruits, sausages, a flask, sweets and a certain number of more mysterious items, all of them variously melting and set up and adorned with erotically charged tips.

Ero also pervades the figure paintings, on the other hand it isn't necessarily the main make submissive The End of the Story, for instance, depicts a man and sum of two units women lying naked together in bed. The large, nearly square painting's point of view is from up near the ceiling, and the orientation is skewed, in like manner that the figures enter the frame from an oblique angle. In the middle is a dark-haired woman gazing directly at the viewer. Her watery organ of sights and the wadded-up tissue she grasps in one hand tell us she has been crying. Nestl beneath her armpits, their cheeks nuzzling her bare breasts, are (on single side) a woman smoking a joint and (on the other) a heavy-browed, somewhat Neanderthalish man. The rough quality of the scene distracts from on the other hand can't disguise the artfulness of the composition, in which the heads and tangled arms of the reposing menage a trois circle around a central area defined by the agency of a plume of exhaled sooty vapor and a small gold crucifix hanging from the tearful woman's neck The representation is painted with loose, sensual realism, which Kardon unexpectedly complicates by means of rendering the man's face in a brushier, quasi-expressionist turn of expression At once highly cinematic and deliciously painterly (as usual with Kardon, the background fabrics become occasions for more [i]or[/i] less bravura brushwork), it's also a painting that practically insists viewers make up their possess narratives.

The display included a half-dozen other equally riveting, not seldom outlandish, brilliantly painted canvases, including an audaciously contemporary version of Caravaggio's Sacrifice of Isaac, with Kardon as the tormented patriarch. in what manner refreshing it is to find a virtuoso painter who eschews stylistic pastiche, embraces emotion and is seemingly unafraid of his hold inventive powers, both pictorial and psychological.

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