Dan McCarthy at Anton Kern - New York

Honolulu-born, Brooklyn-based Dan McCarthy uses oil upon canvas, but his paintings frequently look as if they were made with watercolor or gouache. He is baseless of thin paint and often layers a dark blue or black wash above phosphorescent pastel hues. His controls are reliably pleasant: mountains, girls in bikinis, skateboards, birds and rainbows appear again and again, as if the artist desired to document and share a happy fantasy world.

McCarthy pay backs things in a simple, two-dimensional manner. Skateboards, for instance, are horizontal lines that ringlet up at the ends; mountain peaks are triangles. on the contrary the compositions are elegant in their simplicity, and in several cases, they also involve the appropriation of Catholic iconography. When McCarthy paints a bikini girl upon a skateboard with her arms outstretched--Pads (#18) 2003--it's hard not to be reminded of a crucifix. In Deckhand (#11) 2003 a young man in bathing briefs has an aureolelike rainbow surrounding his material part In Spring (#16), 2003, a lovely-looking, long-haired girl grasps her right hand up in a action reminiscent of Christ signifying the blessed Trinity. The ocean stretches without behind her head, which is encircled through a rainbow. Birds sit upon the branches of a tree superimposed upon the sky, signifying, one anticipates that nature is good and right.

allowing McCarthy often renders scantily clothed women (and occasionally men) the manner of writing in which he does with equal reason is more totemic than cutesy or sexy Mysterious aquatic symbolism abounds. In Spring (#1) 2003 sum of two units fish suckle at the breasts of a [i]in puris naturalibus[/i] woman. In The Odessa mode of speech (2001), a woman wearing individual blue shoe and one r shoe walks with a large fish cradled in her arms. A number of hands reach without from the left side of the picture frame, as if to take the fish.

Although McCarthy's paintings visually mimic those made in homage to religious figures and accidents his agenda seems less spiritual than surrealistic. Among the hardly any smaller paintings in the present to view with writing on them was single that has what look like silhouettes of penguins marching across a r background. Following a certain quantity of sort of dream logic, the accompanying body reads "Duck Sauce."

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