Spring has sprung, and pollen, hormones and mayhem are in the air.
Birds, bees and even beetles are doing their thing as flowers
flirtatiously bloom everywhere. All that and more turns up in some lively shows on Julia Street.
Pop
art was refreshing when it first appeared in the 1960s, but more recent
postmodern pop caused rigor mortis to set in with a vengeance. Enter
the emerging Nola artist Wendo, who fuses traditional comic book
figuration with the digital ambiguities of modern life.
Vvaves, top, features figures with histrionic, Mad Men-era EC comics- style
flourishes set in swirls of paint that meld the frenetic electricity of
Jackson Pollock with a graffiti - like insouciance.
Maybe He'll Find Her
features a Marvel comics - style superhero carrying off a modern tattooed
maiden, but in
You're No Longer the Man I Met Online, left, a retro, nifty late-1950s
style couple experiences a desultory moment as the guy morphs into a
nattily attired police dog. Not everything works quite so well, but
Wendo's best pictures return us to timeless mythic narratives that are
hardwired into the human psyche, and “pop” out at us with a disarming
candor that makes for an impressive first Julia Street solo.

Deft Kafkaesque surrealist Alan Gerson has long
painted cautionary canvases depicting the more unsettling aspects of
earthly life. Here, nature's flair for deadly beauty appears in vivid images like
Ancient Sea IV, above, where moray eels, crabs, carnivorous worms and starfish seem to rather casually devour each other. Similarly,
his lushly painted
Vietnam canvas depicts a densely impenetrable bamboo
thicket stifling all life but for a few decorous bugs. But bugs
rule in
A Fondness for Beetles, where they gather like dense
encrustations of shimmering, bejeweled predators massing for the
vast territorial expansion promised by climate change. An accompanying wall
text quotes the immortal words of geneticist J.B.S. Haldane: “The
Creator, if He exists, has an inordinate fondness for beetles.” ~Bookhardt /
Recent Works: Paintings and Sculpture by Alan Gerson, Through April 15,
LeMieux Galleries, 332 Julia St., 522.5988; VVAVES: New Mixed Media Paintings and Prints by Wendo, Through March 28,
Boyd Satellite Gallery, 440 Julia St., 899-4218.