Vittorio Brodmann
LESLIE FRITZ
44 Hester Street
May 12–June 16
Vittorio Brodmann, Deep Insight, 2013, oil on canvas, 16 x 28”.
The thirteen paintings in Vittorio Brodmann’s latest exhibition—with their cast of mutant and misbegotten grotesques, drooping visages, and a swirling, variegated palette—could be described as Sunday comic strips dipped, so to speak, in bad LSD trips. Painted on small, seemingly store-bought canvases, the canvases attest to a winsomely casual, doodle-esque spontaneity. Indeed, so apparently blithe at times is Broadmann’s execution that success seems more a happy accident than the by-product of concerted planning.
Some works are, if not compelling, then more appealing than others. Among the latter are those fashioned with poppy blocks of color, such as Moods (all works 2013), which features a multiple-headed figure on an orange ground. See also Flirtatious Trap, with its smiling blue face, or Hunger is the Best Sauce, starring a green goblin-like head and his brown bouffant of hair. Other pieces veer into a handling of paint that appears more muddy and expressive, as in Scrambled Eggs, whose pugnacious and brooding panoply of ponderously painted figures seem to lack the conviction of the works mentioned above—but then again, how much conviction can or should a doodle have?
For all this work’s apparent levity and casualness, something deeper and more fundamental is at stake. Each canvas seems to depict a private, anxiety-fueled little hell, and this invests the works with an endearingly comic, humble quality. In the dog-like figure frowning in front of a computer and surrounded by disapproving visages in Deep Insight, and in the weeping farrago of faces in Too Many Jobs, we may recognize versions of our own casual infernos.