The Free Press

Tuesday, October 11, 2022

Page 12

HiLo Art

Kenny Cole’s Savage Menagerie

By Alan Crichton

Kenny Cole’s latest exhibit, “Jesus Christ! Visioning the New Normal,” at Camden’s Zoot Coffee will be on the walls until October 31, and it’s worth a good look.

The artwork mashes together the big themes of our times: world domination, gold fever, war, politics, religion, race, climate change, hypocri- sy, anger, savagery, truth, lies, alternative realities, and the labyrinth of digital technology that pushes our faces into everything all the time.

In another time, this might have been a wildly controversial exhibit. But zoned out on caffeine, oatcakes, the endlessly fascinating World Wide Web, and the warm hubbub of Zoot, we are too busy being part of the exhibition. All around our heads float 16 images that gnash and bite, chop up the world, harangue, win, lose, burst the seams, and part the oceans, and we are smack in the middle of it all, virtually and literally. The art in these paintings makes them seem cool. Cole’s hand and brush are quick and committed, always in service of communicating the conflicting ideas that swarm everywhere. The jagged brushwork, the wild, bright colors and the underlying cartoonery of every character suggest humor. But looking longer, there is the burn of unease. Why is that penguin in a top hat sneaking away? What are those nine ferocious polar bears about to do? Did Santa Claus start that blaze he’s running away from? Hey, Jesus is built like a Schwarzenegger superhero! Do those dolphins bite to kill? Who are all those fren- zied, screaming, gun-toting guys with the books? Look at these paintings for just a little while ... Wow, they are hot! This is satire in the irreverent George Grosz, Max Beckmann mode of a hundred years ago, pricking the conscience of a world falling ever faster into fascism and saying it right out loud. In a conversation, Cole pointed out that there are currently over 200 U.S. Christian denominations, and a staggering 45,000 globally ... so many claims on Jesus’s truths: humility, love, patience, courage, compassion, honesty. Think how many have been enforced with hypocrisy and bru- tality over 20 centuries. Our USA underpinnings are based in the purity of those values, yet we, too, have used the powers of heaven and hell to grasp and hold political dominion. Visioning the New Normal? ... Jesus Christ! indeed! Cole is as tangled in our many webs as the rest of us. But he consistently asks us to emerge from the instant answers and distractions and all the rabbit holes that have become our “virtual homes” and re-enter the world of real time, real problems, real confusions and seek real answers that can possibly carry us through the next few centuries. Could a set of paintings somehow help us do that?