Volume 15, Issue 55
Published May 20th, 2008

...MARK KEFFER'S PAINTINGS a few blocks away at another Tremont gallery, exit {a gallery space}, aren't nearly as messy, but they share an almost desperately playful way of suspending the liveliness of paint between abstract qualities like pattern and opacity on the one hand, and an agile vocabulary of representational shapes on the other. Keffer calls his show Future of Heads, and sure enough, his acrylic-on- panel and paper works look like stills from an intergalactic version of South Park.

"American Gothic," for example, is a 4-foot-square depiction of a truly odd couple. The figural outline on the left has rabbit ears and is a cold shade of pink; its partner looks more like a skull, rendered in white with a knobby horn or part of a spinal column sticking out of its top. Neither has any features, but appears to have been carved from a stack of bricks - or maybe these are outlines only, windows opening onto masonry-like dimensional layers. Behind them a nacreous metallic blue seems to glow gently. Circles linked in various ways are visible in or under this sanded-down blue, inscribed over the fine sideways grain of Keffer's plywood surface like aerial views of crop circles, or maybe the alien blueprints for them. Seven gray and white painted circles bob over "head" across this ground, like bubbles or machines or maybe an inscription in some future alphabet of circles.

Keffer explains, "I want to construct a world comprising images and meanings culled from the fringes of consciousness, creating a kind of distant-future fantasy where animal, vegetable and mineral have merged and are fused with pure abstraction." In line with this, several works on view seem to be sprouting roots or branches, like potatoes or onions, or flowering bulbs. The smaller "Future Head" (14-by-11-inches) looks something like two spuds, one big and one small, sharing an all-over stocking cap that joins them along the bottom edge of the panel. Then again, the knitted-looking lateral stripes go straight across like TV interference and don't imply any underlying features or volume, so again the shapes are more like openings onto a flat, striped plane rather than a description of an object in real space. As elsewhere Keffer's colors are counterintuitive, stacking bands of pale lime green with synthetic Tang orange and black. The background erodes to light gray from scratchy black, spiking in at the edges. A bouquet of orange tuberous branchings spurts from the turtleneck top of the larger entity-aperture, while others gesture, arm-like, from the side.

Several works on paper are executed partly in blood. The blood is Keffer's own and yields a beautifully modulated background of red stripes, clean-edged and sculpted by the artist's ultra-meticulous taping technique. This visual subtlety in itself might be a good enough excuse for using it, but the emotional and bluntly physical resonance of blood adds all sorts of strange echoes to his hybrid figurative abstraction. Keffer prefaces the titles of this series with the words "present-day," as in "Present-day Head" and "Present-day Couple (Modern Lovers)." Five-pointed stars of various sizes rendered in a pinkish tan acrylic are sown erratically over the wall of blood in all four of these studies. Here and there the blood, so discreetly constrained to its compositional use, breaks loose, spattering and "bleeding" a little in the white margins. One begins to think about foreign wars and present-day American wounds. In "Present-day Couple" the blue-striped heads are conjoined, as if kissing, inscribed against a tight universe of careful blood and unlikely stars, as improbable as love.

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