Sticks like glue

Stages of male angst surface in Sweet Flypaper

There’s something about drawing that seems tailor-made for the times we live in. Just as the epic, chest-beating paintings by Julian Schnabel and David Salle that defined the ’80s were emblematic of that oversized age, drawing feels uniquely suited to the sense of insecurity and isolation that defines life in a big-box, globally mandated, corporate world. Drawing gives a delicacy and control to expressions of rage, helplessness and ennui. A delicious tension results between focused, formal restraint and explosive, combustive anxieties.

The four artists in The Sweet Flypaper of Life do their own thing, for sure. Atlanta-based Alex Kvares, Kojo Griffin and Charles Nelson have all made their individual marks on the local, and sometimes, national scene. A third participant, Brooklyn-based William Cordova, is a rising artist who was featured in the Altoids Curiously Strong Collection, which passed through Atlanta last year. While Cordova’s previous work has some definite parallels to these Atlanta artists, the work chosen for Sweet Flypaper — minutely detailed renderings of microphones, a smashed drum, a pile of records — feels less relevant.

With the exception of Cordova, all of the artists in Sweet Flypaper have a shared sense of male angst, alienation and social concerns expressed in an intimate, humble form.

The drawings are hung salon-style in small groupings throughout the gallery, creating a sense that the local artists break down into a kind of life cycle of the male animal: Kvares, the excessive, surly, onanistic teen; Nelson, the politically conscious young adult bristling at the world’s injustice; and Griffin, the old soul who despairs at life’s cruelties but recognizes how ineffectual he is to change things.

Equal parts outward rage and inward anxiety, Kvares’ specialty is work so obsessively detailed and filled with ingrown rage and angst it suggests the kind of doodles whose discovery would get a troubled teen some face-time with the police department. Kvares’ favored trick bag of pentagrams, goats, half-dressed women, greaser cars, piles of fecal brown and pimpled teens all coalesce into a psychedelic swirl ornamented with absurdly fussy decorative flourishes. Like record cover art for some head-trip metal band, alienation is expressed in an underground comics-style litany of sexual sadism, scatology and an almost painful-to-behold inner torment.

But it is often Kvares’ less representational images that get under the skin in a way the more obvious horrors of blood-dripping knives and skulls can’t. Though the imagery is more abstract, the same fixations remain — leaking orifices, sex, death and a combination of horror and beauty. A sublime tension results, between beauty and abjection, decoration and debasement.

Next to the internalized frenzy of Kvares’ work, Griffin’s gentle, potent gouaches are even more lonely and tragic. In one especially effective diptych using the artist’s usual catalog of humanoid creatures, a rag doll schoolgirl clutches her books protectively to her chest. In the accompanying image, a path intersects with the one she traverses. That intersecting road is disturbing and loaded, suggesting a Little Red Riding Hood divergence from the proper path, or a stranger’s journey intersecting malevolently with her own.

Griffin has recognized the benefit in saying more by saying less. By leaving out the back-grounds and focusing in on his animal-people, the world itself — and distracting details — melt away.

Nelson uses a similar approach of paring down details for dramatic effect, while addressing more politically charged issues of race, war and consumer culture. For Sweet Flypaper, Nelson imagines a provocative array of advertisements in vivid colors placed within the gray, sterile world of an airport populated by anonymous men in business suits. The apocalyptic images of robots, tanks and gun-toting action heroes convey the character of our modern life, where the imagined worlds in advertisements and movie posters offer a darkly seductive vision that we invest ourselves in more completely than the grim reality of daily life.

Though a series of collaborative drawings and murals drawn directly onto the gallery walls attempts to intensify connections between the three Atlanta artists, the most satisfying moments in Sweet Flypaper are unorchestrated. It is those unforced, serendipitous connections that show three different Atlanta artists united by form in provocative ways.

Felicia.feaster@creativeloafing.com