The Adventures of PaintoMime by David Henry Nobody Jr. at Satellite Gallery

David Henry Nobody Jr., Paintomime with Brick by Brick (Shattered)

By SIVAN LAVIE May 14th, 2025

The life of a mime is imaginary. As audience members of a miming show, we are invited to inhabit the vividly constructed worlds a mime summons in our mind’s eye. In David Henry Nobody Jr.’s The Adventures of Paintomime, by contrast, the artist transforms a mime’s unsettling dreams and visions into a visual language, sharing his subconscious directly with the viewer in the form of paintings.

Performing under the alter ego Paintomime, David Henry Nobody Jr. renders brightly colored paintings in metallic acrylic on black velvet. Paintomime is a morose character adrift in vaporwave and heavy metal imagination. He conjures a cast of devils, businessmen, sad clowns, goth mimes, and even Jesus Christ. The works draw from a wide range of visual traditions, including schlock painting, Velvet Elvis painting, horror cinema, and the theatrical grandeur of stained-glass religious imagery.

David Henry Nobody Jr. is a performance artist who for over thirty years has enacted different characters. He has pretended to be a red carpet serviceman, unrolling a red carpet for customers on demand. As Alex Vonfurstenberg in 2000, he crashed VIP parties and stalked Donald Trump. Through  and morphed his body into resemblagès, by holding strange objects and painting himself, embodying the art work. As Paintomime, the artist is able to return to his early exploration, as he was trained in painting, through the perspective of a sad mime who he embodies as he paints this velvet series. 

The ten black velvet paintings created for this show are nothing short of kitsch. By examining several of the works, we can appreciate the artist’s clever conceptualization of the exhibition as a mime’s performance, reframing lowbrow Americana kitsch as part of a larger theatrical scheme. In Mental Math, Nobody Jr. depicts a man calculating a mathematical equation while staring at a sad clown in the looking glass. The image and its title evoke the early 2000s film A Beautiful Mind, in which extraordinary intellectual ability, left unchecked, contributes to the protagonist’s psychological unraveling. The painting is rendered in vivid pinks and lilacs, punctuated by the clown’s gleaming red nose at its center. The faces are painted using a single hue that is painted at different transparencies to create tonal variation, producing an effect reminiscent of airbrushing. This technique recalls carnival airbrush art, which often features humorously middlebrow depictions of celebrities painted on the sides of amusement rides to attract customers. 

Brick by Brick (Shattered), depicts a King Kong meets American Psycho business man with the face of a crazed demon, holding up a bus in his hand. He stands in front of a wall of shattered glass in metallic blue. He holds his mime mask his hand as demonds possess him, and a spiral of purple and green tears adorns the border of the painting. Framing the crazed business man in the center of the painting renders him a religious icon, as he stands surrounded by the halo of a shattered, beautifully opal stained glass window. The style of the painting is reminiscent of movie posters from the 90s, and alongside its neon-alien color scheme, are spirals and LED matrix display like shapes. 

David Henry Nobody Jr., Mime in Cage with Collar

The piece Mime in Cage with Collar is painted in a vaporwave aesthetic, evoking both the visual language of the 1980s and that decade’s visions of futurism. It is a centerpiece of the exhibition, as the sad clown figure that haunts the show appears here as its protagonist. Sad clown imagery, along with black velvet painting more broadly, was immensely popular in the United States during the 1970s. Velvet was a staple material of the decade, used extensively in both home décor and fashion. It is not surprising, then, that artists and hobbyists experimented with painting on its plush surface. Black velvet is a particularly playful support: colors appear to glow against its dark ground, while the fabric itself adds a soft, decorative dimension to the image.

The phenomenon of Velvet Elvis became one of the era’s most recognizable cultural obsessions, producing thousands of deliberately gaudy portraits of Elvis Presley. In this context, velvet functions not only as an aesthetic choice but also as a license to embrace bad taste and stand behind it with conviction. The Velveteria, a Los Angeles museum that sadly closed in 2013, celebrated this tradition of midbrow schlock painting. Its collection included exuberant depictions of celebrities, religious icons, and other popular subjects rendered in bright acrylics and, at times, even glow-in-the-dark paint.

David Henry Nobody Jr.’s The Adventures of PaintoMime is a funny and surprisingly poignant exhibition that explores the satirically tragic inner life of a tortured mime. From feeling trapped in a cage to revealing a subconscious populated by crazed geniuses and demonic businessmen, the artist uses the lowbrow aesthetic of black velvet painting to stage the debut exhibition of an old-fashioned, sensitive, and melodramatic clown. Through this deliberately kitschy visual language, David Henry Nobody Jr. transforms the mime’s private anguish into a neon spectacle that is unexpectedly touching.

Arriving to the opening on a bicycle leaden with paintings will be PaintoMime himself, who also invites visitors to attend wearing face paint to connect to their inner mime. 

The Adventures Of PaintoMime, an exhibition of black velvet paintings opens Thursday May 14th at Satellite Gallery 279 Broome St NYC from 6-10pm. The exhibition will be open May 14,15,16 and May 21,22, 23, 12-6pm

Exhibition Link

David Henry Nobody Jr., Mental Math