Look at Peter Opheim’s untitled work. Opheim, who used to be an abstract painter, dreams up figures, crafts them in clay, then paints them with a delicate, fluttering stroke. This one has a blocky white body with five truncated limbs; one hand is just a round pink ball. The brownish, pop-eyed face features prodigious ears and lips like pink sausages. The figure has a childlike appeal; it’s even painted on a baby-blue background. Wildly out of proportion, it’s frightening, yet weirdly earnest.
Several works unnervingly merge figuration and expressive abstraction. Ruby Neri’s “Untitled (Woman With Flowers)’’ is dense, wheeling with patterns and garish hues. Neri builds up her paint to sculptural proportions; this woman’s facial features protrude off the canvas, giving her an aggressive mien. Her hands are like paddles, fending us off.
I loved Michael Hilsman’s “If I had known my robe would come loose, I would have tied it tighter (Fruitman),’’ which takes a page from 16th-century Italian painter Guiseppe Arcimboldo, who built portraits out of fruits, vegetables, and more. Hilsman’s is a woolly-bearded beast with banana arms, kiwi eyes, and a torso full of eggplants and peppers, some artfully rendered, other scribbled on, suggesting he is only just coming to be.
Summer Wheat’s “Zombies (Meat Puppet)’’ jumps off the canvas. The eyes, dolloped on in a brilliant impasto, stand out an inch or two, like those of B-movie zombies. The colors are bold and pure, kelly green and fire engine red. Portrait painters often refer to the paint as skin. Wheat goes straight for the slippery, rotting flesh — a painter’s paradise.
Serious comedy
