Uneasy humor leavens dark fantasy; the disgusting, the hilarious, and the fantastic mingle like old friends at the party referenced in “Let’s Keep This Jam Casual,” the title of André Ethier’s third New York solo show. Viewers are asked to follow a line along which the disturbing and the hilarious come together and then split again, a line that is often blurred yet in its revisions points to a new, as yet unnamed mythology. The seeming sweetness of a wide-eyed stoner musician is actually the paranoia of someone being led into an unanticipated nightmare. The ridiculousness of an owl smoking a cigarette begins to look suspiciously like an old professor fondling a naked and disheveled woman. A woman lies enraptured in a field, her middle fingers raised in some bizarre witchcraft ritual. All are done in vivid color, enhanced by the effect of a wisely chosen medium. The obscure glow of oil slathered on Masonite intimates undiscovered treasure, as if these paintings were accurate depictions of the practices of some lost civilization, pulled from an old farmhouse’s basement or discovered in a thrift store owned by a wizard.
