TONY FITZPATRICK AND OBAJI NYAMBI
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The front-room show features 23 of Fitzpatrick’s recent etchings. His exhibition last fall of larger, more elaborate drawings at Carl Hammer Gallery nearly sold out; these are smaller and more affordable prints, priced between $300 and $800 unframed. The artist fills these little fields with all sorts of figural data–a buxom cartoon gal grinningly shows her stuff on an aptly shaped print called Keyhole Kutie; a larger-than-life insect with human hands and buggy eyes challenges the viewer in The Coming of Locusts; in Shoeless Joe a dejected, teary-eyed scarecrow shows his local loyalties with a prominent White Sox hat (Fitzpatrick wears a Sox cap, too).
The format of virtually all the prints is the same. A central image–girlie girl, tattooed hand, surreal insect, red devil–is surrounded by a host of wispy, fine-lined depictions of apparently incongruous stuff. Buzzing radio towers and scuttling stick men surround the aforementioned grasshopper; a muscular, smoke-breathing bipedal bull stands against a field of bomb-dropping war planes, dancing clock faces, and barbed-wire crowns of thorns. In Crow House, a large black bird is enshrined within a house-shaped ground, crowned with a levitating magician’s hat and swathed in a whirl of stuff that includes a smiley girl, a slithery snake, and a tiny mission church. Stacked flat against the picture plane, the barrage of little images invites close scrutiny, luring viewers into a careful but generally fruitless perusal for some hint of narrative that might hold the images together, for some riddle whose solution might make the etchings “make sense.”
Unlike his women, Nyambi’s males are not depicted at all naturalistically. Consider Le Drume a Contre Coeur: the man looks much like the gift-shop fertility symbols and idol objects that Westerners love to collect for their coffee tables. Using cutouts of Xerox images on rice paper, Nyambi surrounds his women with pages from actual newspaper stories. Cloaked in crinkly reports of plummeting Dow Jones Industrials or the gulf war or some random Bill Clinton sighting, Nyambi’s demure women come to stand for the West, seducing other domains with literacy and whiteness and complicated merchant economies, playfully in love with the exotic images of more “primitive” cultures they’ve devised.
