Obsessed at Zepster Gallery

 Kevin Mosca Out to Get Milk/ Deliveryyyyy!  Center Image Portrait of a Narcissist Kendalle Getty images Courtesy of Tyler Ward Zepster Gallery

Obsessed

Zepster Gallery

220 Bogart Street, Brooklyn

To November 17^th

If New York’s bleeding-edge galleries are any indicator, realism is hot right now. The current show at Zepster, a brand-spanking-new art establishment on the warehouse-crowded edge of Williamsburg, proves that representation is gripping the imaginations of our newest artists. Curated by Shelby Nelson Ward, this exhibition features twelve young artists.

It’s more accurate to say that realism is filtered through pop culture and representation. The new realism showing up on gallery walls today is heavily mediated. Nearly every work appears shaped by thousands of hours of the Criterion Collection, Netflix, social media, and doom-scrolling. Many pieces are not painted from real life, per se, but from images frozen on screens. In other words, these are painters who know all the tricks of the media trade, along with the pop culture in-jokes that go with them, referencing everything from “Euphoria” to low-fi slasher horror.

The roster of artists here is varied and broad. Featured are Stephen Deffet, Jen DeLuna, Claire Elise, Lanyi Gao, Kendalle Getty, Grace Horan, Paul-Sebastian Japaz, Inés Maestre, Rodrigo Moreira, Kevin Mosca, Thomas Tomczak, and Youyi Echo Yan. Each brings their own Gen Z perspective, providing a fascinating window into the anxieties of a new generation of painters. Unease seems to be the theme, or rather, unease about the self. It turns out that the constant self-preening, molding, and presentation of the self for social media weighs heavily on them, and it shows. Their use of media is merely analogical, a visual vernacular that speaks to a deeper underlying malaise.

As a whole, however, the show springs from a single reference: “Obsessed,” the song and video by Mariah Carey. You’ll remember that Carey’s R&B bump-and-grind slow burner was aimed at a stalker many suspected was Eminem. The rapper had flung a few disses in Carey’s direction in his earlier tracks. People enjoyed the drama and the song, which played out in the collective pop music zeitgeist in true high-school rumor fashion.

It fits the parameters of the show, in other words. Shrouded in rumor, murky, pumped full of disquieting energy and throwaway pop culture references, this is well-worn territory for the artists, who have fun playing with the low-grade ick vibes of both the song and our current dysphoric panopticon.

Jen DeLuna, who recently commanded a room of her own at STORAGE in Nolita, offers a painting of two snarling dogs in “Bite of Another”. Or rather, the glistening, frothing jaws of the dogs. Like other artists here, her style is couched in the language of video, with the streakiness of the painting’s surface suggesting VHS, and the glistening saliva suggesting lighting or even Vaseline smeared on a film camera lens. It oozes early ’80s horror foreboding. What does it mean, though? Hard to say, except that it specifically pinpoints a feeling of violence and restlessness.

Not so in her mournful second portrait, “Only Briefly”, where the downcast face of a beautiful Asian woman suggests a moment of reckoning or drama. Faces like these abound in the show. Once again, it’s hard to know if we are witnessing a moment in a soap opera, a sci-fi film, or a private moment. The glamorous touches of light give the whole an unreal and cinematic sheen.

Claire Elise offers the most straightforward visual analogy of self in social media. “Composite Perspective” is a nude self-portrait where she sits multiply refracted in a maze of mirrors, striking poses that are both vulnerable and Instagram-pout-worthy. What’s disquieting is the haunted look in her eyes. She delves even deeper into the unease with “Fixation Study No. 5”, where two faces enmeshed in an act of intimacy (or violence) fuse completely into each other. It’s a moment of Cronenbergian horror. The image manages to portray desire meeting violence meeting media, a la “Videodrome”.

 Claire Elise Composite Perspective/ Fixation Study #5,  images Courtesy of Tyler Ward Zepster Gallery

By contrast, Paul-Sebastian Japaz gives us moments of homoerotic desire that are half furtive and half romantic, resembling a period drama set in the early ’60s. Like other painters here, he has an intuitive grasp of setting, period, and genre. His piece shows a man in the street looking up at another man sitting casually in an open window, jean-clad buttocks resting on the sill, cigarette dangling loosely in hand. Japaz positions his painterly eye like a camera—both figures are caught in a pool of light while the rest of the canvas languishes in darkness. It all hints at a moment of erotic epiphany for the man looking up, perhaps an obsession. The dramatic staging and loving attention to detail express nostalgia for a fictional vintage moment.

Other works borrow even more specifically from cinema. The meticulous paintings of Kevin Mosca manage to be unsettling without the viewer ever knowing why. Admittedly a horror fan, Mosca has invented a character called the "Milkman," a male figure in underwear who prowls through his paintings holding up a paper mask of a cow in one hand, affixed to a stick. He also carries a glowing bottle of milk. This figure lives in the fictional town of “Maiden Valley”, which Mosca claims as the setting.

Thomas Tomczack Cassie/ Buffy, Almost Persephone, images Courtesy of Tyler Ward Zepster Gallery

 There are all manner of elements that give you the heebie-jeebies in these works. The overall styling is preternaturally smooth, with lighting done up in the palette of the Italian Giallo movies of Dario Argento. The Milkman, whose face is never shown, has a disquieting youth and androgyny. His legs are smooth and nearly boyish, but one arm appears sinewy, even muscular. The painting titled “Out to Get Milk” suggests something nefarious, if not downright sinister. What does the figure want? Is he a serial killer? The painting “Deliveryyyy!” seems to suggest so, with both the campy title and the way the figure pokes through an open door, face covered by his mask. Also, what is making that milk bottle glow?

Thomas Tomczak, on the other hand, uses media references to explore feminine vulnerability. His watercolor of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, “buffy, almost persephone”, catches her as a woman who might be Persephone, a Los Angeles ingenue pulled into the swirling underworld of vampirism. “cassie”, on the other hand, focuses on the eponymous character from “Euphoria” in another moment of self-reckoning, blood leaking from a nostril. Tomczak draws us not so much into these moments of drama but rather into the media myths that swirl around them. Why are we so fond of subjecting fictional and beautiful young women to supernatural and emotional trauma?

Youyi Echo Yan centers the show with one of the sculptural works. She presents an elaborate lacquered antique cabinet made from wood, haunted by tendrils of black organic sludge snaking around its interior. If the cabinet is an allegory for the body, the sludge appears to symbolize something sinister and invasive—an internal drama along the lines of the “Venom” movies seems to be suggested here. Or she could simply be referring to Jung’s idea of the shadow, the chthonic impulses that haunt our well-organized and compartmentalized psyches. It’s telling that the same snake-like tendril is on the outside of the box, forming a handle, suggesting it is a key of some sort.

On the whole, this extremely packed show demonstrates that the deeper we move into media culture, the more realism emerges—not as a means of portraying moment-to-moment existence, but rather as a referential tool to express deeper feelings. Media is our lived reality now, and we are merely using its language to portray who we are. It’s a complex, bleak world, but not without its flashes of dark beauty. WM