RICK PROL

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Veteran master of gothic angst, Rick Prol began the brutally stark cycle of paintings featured in this recent show in 1986 and 1987, and completed it in 2002 and 2003. Prol first came to the forefront of new art in the salad days of New York's East Village scene of the early 1980s, along with such contemporaries as Luis Frangella, Richard Hambleton, Mark Kostabi, Walter Robinson, David Wojnarowicz, Mike Bidlo and Jean-Michel Basquiat. These eight paintings, which bear the silent weight of those years like a cross, utter a litany of dead-end alleyways, tenement rooms, ruined plumbing, smashed windows and the knives of despair. Boldly limned, violently and carefully achieved in oil on linen, canvas or wood, they are populated by a horrific, bottle-waving, deranged preacherlike figure in ragged clothes, who flashes delirious eyes and ruined teeth. As much as 10 feet high, the paintings are numbered and titled "Metamorphosis," more in allusion to the long process and changes of their making than to the horrific transformation of Kafka's salesman.

In the gallery's project room, Prol hung many drawings devoted to the creation of a mutant, vengeful antihero that was his contribution to the politically oriented comic World War 3 Illustrated#34 (July-August 2003). Prol sketched a somewhat feline bicyclist as a night-riding agent of evil, equipped with the power to produce terror in the heart of an unwary and vulnerable artist, Prol's alter ego. The mutant agent, who lurks in a darkened alley below the artist's studio, has tentacles that grasp a billy club and a flashlight. Further outfitted with pistol and rifle, the agent dangles a severed head. Studies for World War III Illustrated (also 2003) consists of scores of drawings in ink, crayon, pencil, gouache and charcoal; also on view were nine handsome gouaches on paper featuring the agent pedaling through the night. Intending a cartoon sequence, Prol storyboarded the project. In one of many frames, a backup agent asks, "Did you do this?" referring to the artist's work, and the artist replies, "No, you did," speaking of its ruin. Prol settled on a single frame for publication and blackened it with so much ink it came to resemble a woodcut.

Out of this accumulation of ideas, Prol realized the bicycling agent as a 10-foot-high, oddly reductive assemblage of wood, canvas, found objects and paint. He named it for the principle of Occam's razor, as though to demonstrate that out of many possibilities, the simplest is often the best. In August 2003, this imposing "equestrian" sculpture was installed in Tompkins Square Park on the occasion of a three-day art and culture festival, HOWL 2003. The Stendhal exhibition confirmed the force and gnarly power of Prol's socially conscious work, relevant and timely in its purpose, demanding in the manner of its execution.

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