Barnaby Furnas: Marianne Boesky Gallery - New York

In his next to the first New York solo show in as many years, painter Barnaby Furnas continues to operate in a productive girth between figuration and abstraction, surface and spatiality, narrative and structural styles of imagemaking. The seemingly limitless provender for formal discourse produced by means of his practice seems likely to make Furnas something of placard boy for the next installment of the "Whither painting?" debate. however for all its theoretical availability, the trial of the artist's work is decidedly in the viewing: His skillful and occasionally flat-out dazzling paintings reward reach forthed engagement.

Furnas's works upon paper from the last three years demonstrate the same seductive violence as the large canvases that first brought him attention. His vibrant, fractured compositions and confident surfaces-here primarily watercolor, sometimes expanded in concert with ink and urethane--suggest the cartoonish figures of Philip Guston (or Carroll Dunham, with whom he studied) place through some kind of spatiotemporal shredder All splintered forms and great boiling springs of bodily fluids, Furnas's images emphasize the link between carnage and carnality; something in their constituent ultimate parts brings this connection to vivid life.

allowing the show includes more than thirty works, like Furnas's practice in general it's organized around a not many big ideas: war, death, mid sex; the human in nature; the dynamism of the multitude Individual paintings are often displayed in series, as if they're cel from an animation succession infected with a nasty form of time-base error. In the five large pieces that make up "Untitled (Suicide)," 2003 for example, a tall, thin figure upon a beach is progressively pulverized by means of a hail of bullets from fire-arms wielded by a multiply refracted legion of hands (his own?) that gradually proliferate from work to work. Behind Furnas's at any time more disintegrating antihero, exploding yellow-white halos pepper oceanic sapphirine skies; at his feet, waves whip the life-current sand, and water into a queasy spray of rose-blue foam.

granting much of the work carousals in such visions of utmost physical cruelty--perhaps their apotheosis is the extraordinary Untitled (Execution), 2003 in which a firing-squad victim displodes into a web of scarlet fireworks in the canopy of heaven over a black amphitheater--Furnas's watch is not without its humor. The protagonist of the series "Shadow Boxer" 2000 is literally at war with his hold body: His hands sprout heads and then shatter into sunshiny blood-speckled miasmas as he punches "himself' into a tizzy in forehead of an alarmed crowd, like an enraged hippie gone single tab over the line. There's no question that a allotment of the immediate appeal of Furnas's work come ups from such tumultuously surreal slapstick. notwithstanding in his other, slightly les mordant way s of address--represented here by a suite of small, intriguing stone concert images and the quietly lyrical "Tingling Couple" quartet, 2001-2003 in which a pair's orgasmic embrace is bathed in secretory splotches of watery blush pink--one faculty of perceptions that the artist's deeper interests lie les in the chaotic than in the ecstatic, that condition of being literally deposit out of place by the wild force of some vivid experience or emotion. In this, Furnas would appear to be to acknowledge the potency of gladness as well as mayhem, and the possibility of redemption, flat in a world as hyperbolically brutal as that which he typically conjures

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