Ed Paschke’s recent paintings, at the Maya Polsky Gallery, have a newfound exoticism that is linked to heightened ambiguity.
Some of this is owing to a repertory of facial types and calligraphic symbols the artist has expanded during the last few years. Other aspects are linked to the fineness of color and detail now found in even the show’s smaller canvases.
The function of facial types is probably the most dramatic, as Paschke seems never to have offered viewers the seduction of feminine bone structure as clearly as he does in a few of the new paintings.
These heads have the apparent masks and tattoos found for more than a decade on all the artist’s protagonists. But their contours are at once sharper and more delicate, introducing a species alien to Paschke’s work from the start, when he began to present femininity exclusively in terms of strippers and drag queens.
The delicacy of the facial structures in “Mamba” and “Bar-B-Que” appear to go hand-in-hand with backgrounds activated through stippling. And the increase in optical stimuli gives the works shimmering surfaces that some may feel have raised the emotional temperature from Paschke’s habitual coolness.
Hispanic and African-American males have, of course, appeared in the artist’s work for quite a long time. But here the effect of introducing females is electric, adding a more fragile form to Paschke’s stock company of characters and, hence, a different nuance of expression.
The Asian calligraphy that appeared a few years ago reinforces the new sense of exoticism, particularly since the artist has added cryptic symbols of his own, including a monogram with which he seems to brand the paintings.
A bird’s head, apparently stylized from a piece of folk art or a toy, recurs often throughout the works on show, in some places more as a design motif, in others as perhaps a symbol for the natural — as opposed to fictional artistic — world.
This head is among the elements in “Catnip,” one of three disorienting paintings that play with the format of a landscape. All have giant hands that enter from the top of the canvas, as if to snatch up other motifs and depart. But all have backgrounds resembling skies, as well. So however much the paintings suggest landscapes, the viewer’s relationship to the forms and backgrounds either confounds the suggestion or denies it outright.
An especially tricky work in terms of disorientation is the most recent small canvas, called “Three Plum One,” which presents a head in profile. At first, the head appears to tilt away from us into the picture. But other elements in the painting eventually assert themselves, forcing us to readjust our point of view to above a perhaps sleeping head, looking down.
Finally, the head declares its resemblance to a famous news photograph of the hanged dictator Nicolaus Ceaucescu, which disorients viewers yet again, keeping us on edge as to what we are seeing and where exactly we are.
All this is apart from Paschke’s calligraphy and symbols, so maybe you get some idea of the complexity of a painting that, at 14-by-24 inches, is densely packed for its size.
The show also includes a new etching and collaborative cologram, but it’s the paintings that count.
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The exhibition continues at 215 W. Superior St., through Oct. 14.
