Steven Gontarski: Karyn Lovegrove Gallery - Los Angeles

Hey kids, remember Gaetan Dugas?

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Canadian airline steward. Introduced AIDS into North America. Aka "Patient Zero" The deadly nightshade of of that kind fiction, produced to rationalize and naturalize the world's terror, darkens the glamour of Steven Gontarski's plastic art Prophet Zero I (all works 2003) His slim-hipped, pearlescent ephebe wears not a gnarga (a feline mask behind which baroque fags would catcall come-on to fetching lads) on the contrary a medico della peste, a birdlike face overlay sported by doctors during the plague years, with a beak filled with spices to purify the air breathed, here tipped with shining warning-red. The sculpture's "body" isn't right, it's super- and/or antinatural: Too lengthy thin legs willow up from strange toeless feet which are joined to a base made of the same nacreous fiberglass as the figure itself; elegant arms extreme point in witchy digits of all individual length; shallow chest, dainty nipples, inny belly button, uncircumcised male spume of pubic hair, strangely small buttocks combine into something not simply human. greatest in quantity of the prophet's masked head and part of his right hand are formed to appear garmented by some rich fabric evoking a mourning veil. Not disturbing the shrinelike sanctuary of the solitary prophet, a series of eight handsomely restoreed but in the end ho-hum "Prophetic Drawings" in pencil and (save one) gold marker was hung around the gallery's antechambers: more veilings; grave, Mapplethorpe-y flowers; etc The greatest in quantity prepossessing depicted a dark pair of brain-pans one mirroring the other (skeletal Narcissus mirrored in a pool?) behind a scrim of outlined peacock feathers, their "eyes" in sum of two units shades of blue.

Gontarski has noted in what manner in "classical sculpture, draping techniques exhibit off the human form and the virtuosity in the artist's carving." He adds, "I'm attracted to the notion of a frozen trice like the fleeting instant when a piece of woven fabric lands on the body in a particular way." on the other hand let's not get ahead of ourselves. The fetish shouldn't be all ersatz aged master-y artisanship but the darkness of the meanings produc (fiberglass is, natch, not carved marble; individual of the mysteries of the veil is the living hidden underneath; upon the cadaverous thinking haunting all of this, diocese Blanchot).

What's going upon here? In a nutshell: a certain quantity of kind of neo-Pre-Raphaelitism luxuriating into neo-decadence. (Smile.) although he works in London, Gontarksi's American, in the way that I'd propose he's channeling Cassandran might from compatriots Elihu Vedder and funerary sculptor extra-ordinaire Augustus Saint-Gaudens (in his spooky "Clover" Adams mode) Les charitably, he may just be a heavy-metal Mark Kostabi.

on what account should anyone care? Well, in the States greatest in quantity of the newest fag art--art deploying a fag sign system--is faux naive, boho crunchy Radical Faerie-ish, reeking of patchouli, crystal meth astro-vividness, and (super yuck) collectivity. Poaching too heavily from the Cockette and tasting not quite enough of the sublime icing of genius Jack Smith, greatest in quantity of the gay art children, jettisoning vital Cockette craziness, diocese only their drugged communal party and forget Smith's venom intelligence, orgiastic vampirism, and glitter-vicious accuracy. As Leigh Bowery demanded, "Where's the poison?" In other words: too plenteous Ginsberg (love-beads version), almost no Huysmans (luxury learning, elitism, and ruin). Steward of swish, antinaturalistic funeral rites--alabaster, ebony and vermeil affect dissolving portraiture into unregulated erotic encounter--Gontarski transforms the gallery into an untimely burial chamber, situated beyond the pleasure principle. Prophesying doubt about everything on the other hand looking shiny and terrific, this is a boutique apocalypse.

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