Barnaby Furnas

In his second New York solo show in as many years, painter Barnaby Furnas continues to operate in a productive zone between figuration and abstraction, surface and spatiality, narrative and structural modes of imagemaking. The seemingly limitless fodder for formal discourse produced by his practice seems likely to make Furnas something of poster boy for the next installment of the “Whither painting?” debate. Yet for all its theoretical availability, the proof of the artist’s work is decidedly in the viewing: His skillful and occasionally flat-out dazzling paintings reward extended engagement.

Furnas’s works on 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 deployed in concert with ink and urethane—suggest the cartoonish figures of Philip Guston (or Carroll Dunham, with whom he studied) put through some kind of spatiotemporal shredder. All splintered forms and great geysers of bodily fluids, Furnas’s images emphasize the link between carnage and carnality; something in their constituent elements brings this connection to vivid life.

Though the show includes more than thirty works, like Furnas’s practice in general it’s organized around a few big ideas: war, death, and sex; the human in nature; the dynamism of the crowd. Individual paintings are often displayed in series, as if they’re cels from an animation sequence 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 on a beach is progressively pulverized by a hail of bullets from guns wielded by a multiply refracted legion of hands (his own?) that gradually proliferate from work to work. Behind Furnas’s ever more disintegrating antihero, exploding yellow-white halos pepper oceanic blue skies; at his feet, waves whip the blood, sand, and water into a queasy spray of rose-blue foam.

Though much of the work revels in such visions of extreme physical cruelty—perhaps their apotheosis is the extraordinary Untitled (Execution), 2003, in which a firing-squad victim explodes into a web of scarlet fireworks in the sky over a black amphitheater—Furnas’s outlook is not without its humor. The protagonist of the series “Shadow Boxer,” 2000, is literally at war with his own body: His hands sprout heads and then shatter into sunny blood-speckled miasmas as he punches “himself” into a tizzy in front of an alarmed crowd, like an enraged hippie gone one tab over the line. There’s no question that a lot of the immediate appeal of Furnas’s work emerges from such tumultuously surreal slapstick. Yet in his other, slightly less mordant modes of address—represented here by a suite of small, intriguing rock 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 senses that the artist’s deeper interests lie less in the chaotic than in the ecstatic, that condition of being literally put out of place by the turbulent force of some vivid experience or emotion. In this, Furnas would seem to acknowledge the potency of joy as well as mayhem, and the possibility of redemption, even in a world as hyperbolically brutal as that which he typically conjures.

—Jeffrey Kastner