Raymond Uhlir at Deborah Colton

Raymond Uhlir’s first solo show, “Hooray for Sanctimony: A Calvinist Adventure Through the Sophist Temple of Doom,” is a Saturday-versus-Sunday mashup of scriptural illumination and cartoon-morning psychedelia. In seven paintings and more than a dozen drawings, Raymond drafts the fundamental template for a fundamentalist mythology—told with a syntax borrowed from video games, cartoons, and choose-your-own-adventure serials. His superflat style is cousin both to Inka Essenhigh’s dramatic narratives and Takashi Murakami’s reflections on popular culture. And, almost as an afterthought, Uhlir captures the two crucial factors that have made religious observation the worldwide hit that it is today: fear and sexual repression.

“In the beginning was the Word” is the kick-off to one of the more storied traditions from which Uhlir borrows; if there were a similar preface to Uhlir’s universe, it would go “PRESS SELECT / START.” A pair of portraits—Sinistral, an icon featuring an astronaut performing a sort of benediction, and Tiger, the blue satanic specter who prowls Uhlir’s landscapes—show us the interpretive options available to the viewer. But it’s clear enough from Golden Egg that either Uhlir has cut off one avenue to the viewer, or that the viewer has “chosen” the spiritual over the scientific, and we progress from there with an ecclesiastical understanding of the universe.

Raymond Uhlir, Golden Egg, 2005.

In The Cape, a godhead figure wearing a mitre (and bearing some resemblance to Martin Van Buren, had he dressed like Kaiser Wilhelm II) opens wide his cape to spore the denizens of Uhlir's universe, a bunch of befuddled-looking teddy bears. Local flora and fauna—ornamental flowers, perhaps poppy or hibiscus, and the afore-mentioned tiger—lend the landscape a specifically Oriental flavor: full of wondrous delights, curiosities, trinkets and totems. Uhlir's cartoon aesthetic is neatly juxtaposed with the pessimism underpinning this mythology. One gets the sense that this god's chosen people, endowed by their creator with overlarge, bulbous genitalia and a vacant disposition, are perhaps not the noblest of creatures.

Raymond Uhlir, The Cape, 2005. Click for larger view.

Any viewer who has spent time as or around an adolescent boy recently will recognize Mega Man in two of Uhlir's paintings, The Fall and The Death. It’s a risky reference: Uhlir's imagery is otherwise universal, making Mega Man a jarring focal point. (But not the only video game reference; throughout the works the landscapes are chock full of perilous cliffs, jumps, enemies, treasure chests, and power-ups.)

Raymond Uhlir, The Fall, 2005.

Is Mega Man too glib a dismissal of, you know, Paradise Lost? Let’s say that this isn’t a belief system for Harold Bloom. But Uhlir’s universe is more democratic. I know the passage describing the fall from Lucifer’s plunge through the realms of Chaos, but hell, I also know Mega Man’s pose from the video games—the various points in which he falls through screen after screen of darkness. I recognize the glint of existential crisis in Mega Man’s pixellated eyes.

I think the gamble paid off, but that doesn't purchase these two paintings entirely. Stylistically, Uhlir is looking at Essenhigh’s work; both artists use oil enamels and have a mordant sense of humor, but Uhlir's black comedy is zanier. He lifts the traffic cones for the pentagram outline featured in both The Fall and The Death from Essenhigh's Daedalus and Icarus, and to good effect, though the all-over black in The Fall doesn't work as a fluid, liminal realm the way that the pink field does for the figures in Essenhigh's painting. The vacuum in The Fall might be necessitated by the narrative, but the allover black—though rich—doesn’t quite live up to the exceptional compositions in Uhlir's other paintings.

The drawings are a spare presentation of apocryphal and secondary material. Far from being simply supplementary to the paintings, the drawings—not all, but several of them—introduce a different storytelling strategy: metonymy. As opposed to the metaphorical symbolism, in which a metaphor is used to relate distinct things ("that car is a lemon"), metonymy involves the use of the synecdoche, a construction in which a part of a thing is used as a substitute for the whole ("that team has good hands"). In Sexy War Time the bishop and cardinal stand in for the church; the vagina, for the sexual freedom in opposition to which the church stands. The drawing is a double-edged pun on the word “fold”; symbols from Uhlir’s stable of creatures also make appearances in the soup.

Raymond Uhlir, Sexy War Time, 2005. Click for larger view.

It’s not ultimately clear from the show—just closing at Deborah Colton in Houston—whether Uhlir’s exhausted this universe in a narrative sense, but there’s surely room for another testament if it shows the same flex in color and composition.

Posted by Kriston at August 18, 2005 4:47 PM