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Jon Pylypchuk at Friedrich Petzel

Art in America, Dec, 2005 by Nancy Princenthal

Jon Pylypchuk's sense of humor is pitch black, and won't tickle everyone's funnybone. But its provocations aim wide. A Canadian-born, UCLA-educated, ex-Royal Art Lodge member previously known (sometimes) as Rudy Bust, Pylypchuk has a much funkier sensibility than the Lodge's best known graduate, Marcel Dzama, and also a less babe-in-the-woods sense of menace. "I have thought deep into this trouble," the title of this exhibition and of one of the works in it (all 2005), is among the more family-friendly of the phrases that are lettered in minuscule script on collages and paintings alike. More typical is "stop treating me like a plastic fuck doll," uttered by a black velvet worm with a Mohawk. The response, from a macrocephalic black cat with a ribbed-knit body and fake fur ears, is "kiss me." Behind them are a blushing pink sky and a paper mountain range; the white peaks alternate with scraps of printed cloth, tucked there like handkerchiefs in blazer pockets.

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All of Pylypchuk's new collages, assembled from irregular pieces of paper, swatches of cloth, bits of hair, fuzz, yarn, sponge, and what in one case looks like navel lint, thrive on the dissonance between the coy fragility of the imagery--the starved kittens, crippled dogs, and other nameless, hapless-looking beings--and the sucker punches delivered by the words they speak. A slightly different dynamic takes hold in the liberally mixed-medium paintings. In these, somewhat more robust (and malevolent) versions of the same menagerie are planted in woeful landscapes that owe a great deal to the Art Brut of Dubuffet, whose steam-rollered nudes lurk behind Pylypchuk's imagery, too.

But the most potent work here is the sculpture. Over the past few years Pylypchuk's assemblages have moved off the wall and onto the floor, and he here introduces half a dozen relatively substantial tableaux. The biggest is a boxing ring in which a defeated tiger sits in one corner, gloves to face, while the winner, a wobbly goat, stands opposite. Between them, a cat leans his shovel against the mound of a freshly filled grave. The fake fur, the gloopy strings of tears and shot that run from the boxers' faces, adding to the silliness of the whole scenario, are delivered with sufficient care and gravity that truly hellish visions of the animal world, from Bosch to Sue Coe, come more readily to mind than, say, works of Amy Cutler or Tom Otterness (dark though both can be). Other grisly Pylypchuk tableaux include one featuring a black cat dejectedly twirling spaghetti out of a bowl into which blood drips from his bandaged eye. Nearby, another cat vomits copiously. Less gruesome but still a tad unsavory are two black cats peeing in comradely unison against a column, jeans around their ankles, their urine joining to form a puddle of gleaming gold.

Dubuffet was equally and indiscriminately enthusiastic about the art of children and of the emotionally ill, and his legatees have generally preserved the confusion between madness, healthy or otherwise, and innocence. Pylypchuk is an exception. His beastly assemblages, neither childish and simpering nor coldly ironic, pry open space for a good old-fashioned howl.

Jon Pylypchuk at Friedrich Petzel

Art in America, Dec, 2005 by Nancy Princenthal

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