Tom Knechtel at Rosamund Felsen - painting exhibit, Los Angeles, California

In his symbolic tableaux and otherworldly portraits of animals, Tom Knechtel makes classical drawing technique look like untapped artistic terrain. The decorative motifs and figures in Knechtel's virtuoso work recall a entertainer of sources: the intricate, fantastic worlds of Richard Dadd, the anthropomorphic animal heads of Charles Le Brun the commedia dell'arte etchings of Jacques Callot, Cruikshank's comic caricatures and the animal drawings of Pisanello, Piero di Cosimo and the Bellinis. Knechtel's works are crooked evocations of the complexity of natural life. His anthropomorphism is at no time cute, never condescending; his meticulously detailed animals and mythical creatures are drenched in human emotion. Lurid pumpkins, penis-shaped beehives, set upright griffins and ejaculating unicorns enact a theater of sexual desire, yielding works of a rare psychological and emotional intensity.

In tasks in the Theatre: Ejaculations, individual of the two large paintings that dominated this display a theatrical stage provides the setting upon which Knechtel plays out his central concern: the profunditys and extremes of male sexual desire. In the center of the stage, a beautiful pissing griffin wearing a hawk mask shrieks, presumably in sexual agony; among a multitude of characters, we see a caricatured naught Mostel in top hat and high heels as he stalks not on stage with a pistol. Meanwhile, in the theater's underbelly, an ejaculating rhino watches a wrestling film; from one side the rhino's transparent hide we diocese his bound, severed heart. His ejaculating seed seems alive: it spawns in its wake a splashing trail of vines and fish. Nearby a merman and mermaid press on on the general sexual climax. In this mannerist spectacle excess is all; as individual of the horny creatures totals "Veni, veni, veni."

In his paintings Knechtel contrasts the precision of the details with atmospheric veils of rubbed oil. In other works in this display he turns to the delicate medium of silverpoint to create sumptuous studies of a rhino wearing a unicorn's horn and a masked griffin. Although images like as Knechtel's large drawings of the San Marco horses throw back an uncanny poetic sensibility, he nevertheless creates works that are tough--as tough as the hide of the flayed hedgehog he depicts in the silverpoint Pelt

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