Jonathan Santlofer at Pavel Zoubok

Blending fact and fiction in paintings and works on paper, the artist and novelist Jonathan Santlofer explores art-historical moments as they might have been, liberally supported by the manufacture of ephemera. using a variety of mediums and supports, including watercolor. gouache, oil, acrylic, pencil charcoal, Hydrocal, canvas and linen. Driven by the artist's wry internal narrative, these objects (all dated 2005) reflect his keen interest in things Dada, and demonstrate his fabrication of unlikely star turns by such famous people as Monroe, Man Ray, Mapplethorpe, Mondrian, Duchamp and Picasso.

Using watercolor, gouache and pencil on paper to create trompe-l'oeil adhesive memo slips in the 22-by-30-inch Pink Post-its, Santlofer assumes the point of view of Andy Warhol standing back from the studio wall, confronting false starts in the gestation of his famous Marilyns. Notes are penciled on the pink papers that are stuck to the wall, to an incomplete grid of blue Marilyns and to one high-contrast orange and white faux photograph of Warhol himself. The notes record such musings as "Marilyn pictures--part of a death series to do of people who died in different ways (Disasters?)" and "Thinking about retiring from painting--it's just not fun anymore (* Buy new camera)." Furthering the unending exploitation of Marilyn, Santlofer's pencil drawing August 4. 1963 imagines three tattered black-and-white photographs from a scrapbook. trompe l'oeil corners glued to a tattered black page. Here is Marilyn, seen from behind, singing to the president, and also in two nude shots. The same size as the "Post-it" painting but vertical, the work is titled for the evening of Monroe's death.

Santlofer would have the viewer believe that the 30-by-22-inch pencil and gouache Love, Robert, a faux photograph of a bouquet of calla lilies and a lady's slipper that appears to be taped to an artificial wall, is from some unknown inventory of photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe himself. This unlikely, fleetingly believable tribute is inscribed, "A bouquet for you." Similarly, in another drawing in the manner of photographs--these are among Santlofer's most convincing works--a sequence of black-and-white film stills records the final frames of the shower scene in Hitchcock's Psycho. Casting a broader net in Degenerates, Santlofer addresses the suppression of the work of German avant-garde artists prior to World War II, and in Revolution! riffs on the early history of the Russian avant-garde.

The most ambitious of Santlofer's new works is Man Ray, Marcel & Marilyn. This approx. 5-by-4-foot oil and acrylic on wood depicts Man Ray and Duchamp ruminating over a chess game. With print-style text weaving in and out of various scenes, Duchamp takes the blame for the course of modern art, and Man Ray lies through his teeth about an imagined photographic session with Marilyn. They talk about this artist with the wig, this Warhol, who makes mechanical images of celebrities. The text concludes with a believable attribution to Duchamp that suits Santlofer's own work: "Art lies all the time."

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