Sometimes to go forward, you have to go back. Peering into the past, of childhood dreams, those phantasms and fantasies in the fold between sleep and waking, that place where you can x-ray spec into a body of work, the silhouettes of men with hats, of strokes of paint like snakes and corporeal presences, Gregor Samsa and Johnny Walker skulking in the patterns of the picture plane. The colors are all dripped in acid, vivid hues from a nuclear age, left out in the sun to fade despite their radioactive brilliance. David Korty's most recent paintings beam a certain innocent grace at first glance, but they get more sinister the longer I look at them. The surfaces echo children's animations from a far-off country, simultaneously familiar and exotic, but in their depths, the behatted man's eyes multiply, the subtle brush strokes grow more intense, fractured, almost collaged with scissors that can reform a body with the fluid grace of paint more than any scrap culled from the curling pages of an old magazine.
New York City, NY; NYC