Zak Smith at Fredericks & Freiser

Zak Smith's recent exhibition, "Exquisite as Fuck," featured a grid of 98 elaborate drawings, each depicting a voluptuous young woman (or two) in sexual abandon with a like number of octopuses in labyrinthine, bordello-like chambers, each handsomely drawn in acrylic and metallic ink on 10-by-8-inch sheets of paper and pinned to a gallery wall. The screenlike expanse of 100 Girls and 100 Octopuses (2005) recalls a renegade octopus introduced in the course of Smith's 760 drawings for Pictures of What Happens on Each Page of Thomas Pynchon's Novel Gravity's Rainbow (2004), a celebrated installation of drawings included in the 2004 Whitney Biennial. Smith's fantasy couplings also recall Hokusai's woodblock print of 1820 and a 2001 work by Masami Teraoka, both featuring an ecstatic woman improbably coupling with an octopus.

Viewers initially attempting to scan Smith's grids starting at the top and from left to right are easily seduced by vivid passages throughout this roughly 6-by-10-foot field. There are elaborate architectural details and moments of intense color that suggest the brilliant tessellations of Gustav Klimt, interspersed with sequences limned in black ink alone, at times as photographically realistic as they are abstract in their littered and patterned surrounds. Pouting, modish Lolitas assume a variety of postures in thigh-high stockings, boots, thongs and tops, in varying states of undress, disporting with patterned octopuses often as bright as the stripes of the Swiss Guard. There are graphic-novel moments, minus any text: abandoned meals, chopsticks thrust into Chinese take-out containers, bottles, handbags, an electric fan. A wine-sated octopus pours a stream of red from a beaker. A half-moon wash of orange and red resolves into the factual, boxed remains of a pizza, spilling from one frame into the frame below.

Smith's series of roughly 3-by-2-foot portraits in acrylic and ink on plastic-coated paper, "Girls in the Naked Girl Business" (2004-05), is an homage to professional strippers, club dancers and models in the skin trade. Among them, the crimson-haired subject of Girls in the Naked Girl Business: Sawa slumps in a side chair, looking toward the viewer as to a camera, comfortable in her domestic disarray. Tattoos spell out a word on her fingers, and a tattoo pattern inches up her arm. Confident Amber reclines fully naked on her bed with computer equipment on a desk just beyond and pictures pinned to the wall, while Goth Voltaire, arms covered with tribal patterns, sits regally in the graffiti-strewn wreckage of an urban wasteland. Among other portraits, Smith installed drawings on translucent paper that he contact-printed and a grid of small acrylic-and-ink drawings, pinned close together, including a self-portrait. Smith's art is a labor-intensive one, populated by arguably powerful women who are manifestly illuminated by his affection for them. In Zak Smith, Pictures of Girls, a book published at the time of this exhibition, he admits his intention to achieve something opulent, decadent and beautiful, and in his work, he succeeds.

COPYRIGHT 2006 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning