Erik Parker

New York City

Paul Kasmin Gallery currently presents Erik Parker: Bye Bye Babylon – an exhibition of eleven 2012 still-life and jungle-landscape paintings by Erik Parker. Updating these traditional art-historical genres through the pictorial idioms and sly humor of satirical cartoons, psychedelia, and underground comic books, Parker’s paintings provide vistas into brilliantly colored worlds of semi-sentient flora and idiosyncratic geometries.

For Parker, creating the jungle paintings provides him with a way to escape into custom-made exotic locales without having to leave his Brooklyn studio. He draws inspiration from the imaginary landscapes of Henri Rousseau – who never left his native France, and Joseph Yoakum – who mixed his memories of his own travels into his visualizations of unknown cities and countries. In Parker’s fantastical scenes, fleshy, claw-like leaves and snaking vines part to reveal panoramas of placid rivers and distant mountains. Lending a sense of tongue-in-cheek surrealism to Parker’s compositions, the leaves and vines cast unrealistic shadows onto the sea and sky behind them. Following the logic of cartoons and dreams, these jungle scenes and still-life paintings feel seductive and eerie; visually sensible but also askew.

Paul Kasmin Gallery

September 6th – October 13th, 2012
293 Tenth Ave.
New York, NY 10001
USA

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