After a tour of the galleries on New York’s Lower East Side, I returned to Chicago with a new perspective from which to gauge this city’s images and ways of seeing. Just as the Lower East Side has been treated in the press as a self-contained sphere emulating all that is good and bad in the larger art-marketing arena, so Chicago art has been compartmentalized as “regional.” Its separate identity partly reflects differences in style and subject matter from the art of the rest of the country; successive generations of Chicago imagists, who hold the copyright on figurative allegiance, have elegantly

Mark Jackson’s new work is disturbed by fear and paranoia. Not that his previous paintings weren’t psychologically pregnant with a certain dread, but what was before a covert unease has now blossomed into full-blown horror and hallucination. A man looks over his shoulder as giant facial features materialize behind his back; a woman balances precariously between leering, disembodied men’s heads bobbing around her like balloons; a man raises his arms to fend off a woman’s grinning face coming at him from the upper right corner of the canvas. Titles like Out of the Darkness, 1983, and Between the