"Runt", 2010, mixed media on canvas, 120" x 84" (diptych)

John Yoyogi Fortes isn’t a street artist but he paints like one – one who’s especially well-versed in American and European Expressionism.  His specialty is the urban fever dream, a realm in which subconscious fears and desires play out against backdrops of crumbling paint-spattered walls.  It’s brightly hued and richly textured world into which the artist inserts comic- and graffiti-influenced characters that are in psychic pain.  They appear — along with forms that are collaged, sprayed, and hand-painted — in colliding planes that rest on layers of scraped paint that recall surfaces where concert posters are continuously stripped and re-stapled.

Fortes creates an electrically charged, claustrophobic atmosphere filled with high-def images and stupefying excess, where little makes sense and everything seems wrapped in a cocoon of white noise.  Thus, in Fortes, fans Francis Bacon, Manuel Ocampo, Sue Coe and others of an expressionist bent will find a kindred spirit – one who’s also absorbed the influences of underground comic artists like Robert Crumb, Ed “Big Daddy” Roth and the whole freak-show milieu of RAW Vision, the journal of outsider art.

"Untitled", 2010, acrylic, enamel and collage on canvas, 50" x 40"

Runt, the largest (120 x 84”) painting on view, is typical of the artist’s output over the past few years.  Out of a ground of geometric swatches laced with vertical stains and loose spray-painted lines, faces and figures appear like apparitions. Some are vividly rendered; others seem vaporous, as if summoned by a darkroom trickster in an early 20^th century “spirit photograph”.  The painting’s most prominent feature is a trio of elongated eyeballs that hang by tentacles from a mask in the manner of Roth’s “Rat Fink” character — an expression of extreme cartooning and, perhaps, a pointed reference to the ubiquity of the surveillance camera.  I say perhaps, because Fortes’ works rarely make direct statements about anything; they take an allegorical stance, but their allusions are wide-open.

Where in the past Fortes’ work pointedly referred to issues of race, identity, sexuality and global politics, the paintings here seem less driven by conscious intentions than by an urge to allow his arsenal of self-invented characters and appropriated images to interact freely.  Like many of the Lowbrow/Pop Surrealist artists with whom he feels an affinity, Fortes tends to back away from overt proscriptions, preferring instead to play hot potato with live ammunition to see what ignites.

"It Sounded a Lot Better Before I Said It", 2010, acrylic, enamel and collage on canvas, 12" x 9"

Untitled, a portrait of an urban hipster, is cheerfully apocalyptic.  Sprouting from its Picasso-influenced face is a thought balloon filled with red splotches of blood.  Below the face, which rests on a pedestal, is a severed hand onto which spills more blood.  It Sounded A Lot Better Before I Said It features a boxy figure.  Its heart is exposed, and one of its severed limbs sports a swastika-like crest.  Both are fine examples of how Fortes projects terror into a comic format.

In this exhibition, he fills much of the gallery with small works, many of which seem small-bore when compared to his more expansive, wall-sized excursions.  A reoccurring motif these small paintings is a cigarette-smoking primate whose picaninny visage appears most memorably on Smoking Monkeys, a series of 65 wall-mounted paint can lids.  This racist caricature should shock, but when pulled out of context, as it is here, it loses power.  To understand why, look at a prior work like Immaculate Rendition (2008), where Fortes used a similar image to devastating effect, and you see that as an abstract painter with narrative inclinations – however abstruse — Fortes only hits full stride when he has a big canvas. 

–DAVID M. ROTH 

 John Yoyogi Fortes: Parallel Boondocks @ Jack Fischer through Dec. 4, 2010

To learn more about John Yoyogi Fortes watch the video of him creating Immaculate Rendition.

Immaculate Rendition

Hip deep in the appropriationist methods that took hold in the 1980s and that continue to fuel low-brow production as it inches toward highbrow respectability, John Yoyogi Fortes stands out for his ability to seamlessly integrate many different styles.  His canvases, which roam from large to monumental, begin with an under girding of marks and color swatches and then build out into quasi-expressionist statements that hint at oblique political and personal conundrums.  

 In league with current trends in street art, Fortes practices a loose method of icon and symbol deployment that keeps viewers intrigued and suitably off-balance.  His thinly painted characters, pulled from American and Asian comics and from ’50s clip art, are united pictorially by brushed, spray-painted and stenciled graphic shapes that when combined, allude to narratives that may or may not exist.  It’s a trickster’s game, and a good one at that. 

 To wit: It’s easy to be amused by the telepathic “communion” between Superman and Jesus (”Exercise in Mindfulness”); the vaporization of ’50s television characters (”Christonite/Unsuspecting Impure Halo”); and the apparent satirization of the Chinese pharmaceutical industry (”Gift/Immaculate Misconception”).  Still, for all the fun, Fortes knows how to sling a broadside.  His largest (120 x 96″) canvas, “Immaculate Rendition,” shows an Asian cartoon character bound in chains whose face appears to be that of Little Black Sambo.  Outlined by a white shape that is equal parts Swastika and human figure, the picture makes a searing and unambiguous statement about American foreign policy.

Linda Raynsford: Connected

 Sculptor Linda Raynsford seems like an odd partner in this context; but she activates the room’s considerable space with works that challenge conventional notions of how steel should behave.  I’m thinking in particular of “Connected,” a piece derived from metal doors that were cut up and “woven” into forms that dangle like seed pods from the ceiling, and of “Swollen,” a similarly crafted pedestal piece that looks like a big, gleaming donut.  ”I Left My Wife,” a large, floor-mounted stainless steel disk pounded into irregular surface shapes and inscribed with text, also confounds perception: the bottom is flat, like a deflated tire.

 In art and life, things are rarely what they seem, and in this show, which is essentially a conjuring act, both artists succeed at upending expectations.