Art in Review
CHARLES
BURNS
Adam
Baumgold Gallery
Through
Oct. 11
One of today’s pre-eminent comic-book artists, Charles
Burns takes his readers on funny and scary journeys down all kinds of
mind-bending rabbit holes. This absorbing exhibition of drawings dating from
1983 to the present is his first solo exhibition in
Mr. Burns’s high-contrast, cleanly contoured,
black-and-white ink drawings resemble mid-20th-century linoleum-cut prints.
They have terrific graphic punch. He also has gripping storytelling instincts.
Every frame makes you eager to know what will happen next. As in all good
comic-book art, you are caught between wanting to slow down and savor the
visual experience and the urge to race ahead to find out how the unpredictably
strange narrative will unfold.
See, for example, pages from “El Borbah,”
whose chapters follow the noirish adventures of a
hard-boiled detective who appears in the guise of a fat, retired professional
wrestler in lucha libre
mask and grappler’s singlet.
The present exhibition focuses on single, full-page images
made as covers for Mr. Burns’s famous serialized graphic novel “Black Hole.”
Many of these have an eerie, archetypal resonance. The beautiful, naked young
woman with a tail crouching in the forest as she eats a sandwich; the view from
underground of a frightened young man peering into a vaginally shaped hole; the
part-human, part-frog “Fetal Creature” lying helplessly on its back in the
grass. These and others could be illustrations for a modern Grimms’
fairy tales.
KEN
JOHNSON