This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, Nov. 29, 2010 - Curated by Chicago-based designer Monte Beauchamp, "BLAB!" at Philip Slein Gallery features new paintings, prints, and illustrations by artists who have been published in Beauchamp's journal of the same name.
Beauchamp has established himself as the leading visionary in this field, recruiting a cadre of artists whose works are distinct and yet all suffused with a particular sensibility, recalling vintage advertisements and comics, grotesques and caricatures, folk illustrations and pulp fiction.
This exhibit includes a particularly saucy work by St. Louis' own Tom Huck; Marc Burckhardt's "Well-Matched Lovers," a beautiful rendered, Renaissance-inspired painting of monsters embracing (complete with craquelure on its surface); and four Fred Stonehouse illustrations of Spanish aphorisms, mimicking Mexican folk painting styles.
Humor pervades the collection here, but it's slightly askew, as in Larry Day's ink and watercolor "Rapture in Birdville" and Ryan Heshka's painted mash-ups of 1950s superhero comics, girlie mags and true crime stories. C.J. Pyle's drawings on the inside of album covers are beautifully wrought and nightmarish at once, as are Kari Laine McCluskey's hand-colored photographic prints showing dolls arranged in surrealist fairy tale tableaux.
Also on view are works by Jethro Kamberos, Gary Baseman, Travis Lampe, Gary Taxali, Owen Smith, Michael Noland, Mark Todd (his "Dreaded Mothman of West Virginia" is not to be missed), Teresa James and Don Colley. (A selection of these works will travel with Philip Slein to Art Miami, and will be temporarily unavailable for viewing.)
Ivy Cooper, a professor at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, is the Beacon art critic.