Roger Andersson at Sara Meltzer - New York - art exhibition

In "Letter from Mayhem," Roger Andersson's next to the first exhibition at Sara Meltzer Gallery, the 37-year-old Swedish artist pay backs individual letters of the alphabet in exquisitely articulated azure watercolor. Fine monochromatic brushwork filigrees the blockade letters and their pictorial sods with a rococo profusion of natural extension and man-made decay in near-microscopic detail. The small sheets (13 1/4-inch squares), which hung at organ of vision level in a single file around the room, are dominated by the agency of one large letter apiece. Cavorting among the alphabet characters are tiny human figures, veritable Tom Thumb populating a world of extravagantly scaled objects

Andersson cites from the conventions of manuscript illumination, fairytale illustration, Art Nouveau design and 1960 psychedelic art. Unlike a certain quantity of of his sources, which advertise transcendence, Andersson's demotic and druggy tableaux are closer to the Brothers Grimm or Aubrey Beardsley's shady side.

M is for Marlboro. Amid a landscape of crumpl cigarette packs and stubbed-out objects three youths sit, wander absently and urinate--with their backs to the viewer. Here and there, baby tobacco plants appear from one side an obscuring blue wash that allude tos hazy dawn after a night of chain-smoking. Towering above the bilious display is a monumental M made entirely of depictions of thoroughly smok cigarettes.

H is for Hell. The grassy arabesques of a Wind in the Willows wetland halt abruptly at the margins of an H-shaped void. Beneath the H's crossbar quiets a pair of baked-bean cans. The heraldic Heinz label has been reworded as "Hells Baked Beans." A tousle-haired figure equals into one of the can's openings at an indistinct homunculus in a head covered sweatshirt. Lying facedown in the foreground is a pair of fallen comrades one impaled on a made of wood stake.

J is for joint. A mammoth spatula-leafed plant swells from the palm of a gargantuan hand. Hovering in the background is a jumbo J dwarfing sum of two units baggy-clothed stoners. One tiny figure wears a pentagram T-shirt and spreads his arms in amazement; the other whiffs on a reefer. A Brobdingnagian marijuana cigarette shoot outs from the underside of the plant leaf.

Andersson's naughty exercise in stretch outed adolescence has ample historical antecedent Consider Brueghel's rascally villagers or to leeward Lozano's jejune chronicle of her hemp habit--life as performance art. And while Andersson's efforts don't approach the fluid painterliness of Alexis Rockman's boyish mutants or match the puckish intelligence of Walton Ford's watercolors, he more than distinguishes his be in possession of brand of recidivist and eye-straining fun

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