Lucid Culture

If Whitfield’s bright, carnivalesque pastel paintings are meant to be satire, they are resoundingly successful. If not, his work on display at 31Grand through April 19 is inadvertently a scathing condemnation of the effeteness of the idle and the affluent. One striking canvas shows a woman striking a flouncy pose, tangled in a long string of pearls, a wireless phone receiver hanging dramatically from her hand, a uniformed man (who is supposed to be Klaus Kinski) to her right, caught in the camera. As an American Gothic parody, it’s good for a laugh, maybe more if the artist is slinging arrows at his subjects. It’s hard to tell. At least he has a sense of humor: another canvas shows a nude Abraham Lincoln, his penis erect, sitting beside a rodent pedaling furiously on a treadmill. Perhaps the most striking of all of these has a woman snaring a bird with just a flick of her pearls as they encircle its talons.

Whitfield seems to have a bird flu fixation: there’s a series of paintings featuring a blonde woman (who’s supposed to be Sarah Jessica Parker, although she looks a lot more like an older, fatter Bette Midler) surrounded by birds. The best of these shows her wearing a fur scarf with the animal’s face still attached, a trio of Buddha-like children below her, each with its own matching pet vulture. A send-up of yuppie parenting, or not?

Whitfield is also curator of the group show in the back of the gallery, which is a mixed bag. The artists’ names weren’t matched to individual works, at least at the opening, but there’s plenty to intrigue. The most captivating is a trio of still videos of a captive woman, pictured out-of-focus in various states of disrobe. It’s hardly erotic, therefore all the more disturbing. There’s also a big gold statue of a seated, grinning Ganesh with elephantiasis of the ears, a striking oil of a skull heavily troweled, so much as to be literally three-dimensional in yellows, whites and pinks, surrounded by troweled 3-D flowers in various shades. In addition, another oil colorfully and quite oddly juxtaposes a mosaic beneath a brilliantly lit water cave, the obsidian of the rocks above making an intense contrast with the reflection on the surface of the water beneath.

Whatever the ultimate intent of everyone involved here, this is definitely a show to see. 31Grand is at 143 Ludlow Street between Stanton and Rivington on the west side of the street. Gallery hours are Tues. - Sat. 12 – 7 PM