Simon English at Fred

For Simon English's first exhibition with London's Fred gallery, the 47-year-old British artist presented 11 small crayon-and-ink works densely arranged in rows, and three 8-foot-square drawings on single sheets. Each work contains multiple vignettes. The large ones resemble oversize pages from an impressively eclectic artist's sketchbook. Esoteric historical and contemporary popculture references, sexual images, lyrical texts about love, quotes from songs and pretty doodles are mixed together to produce a potpourri of imagery. At first the combinations look arbitrary, but closer investigation reveals the endearingly eccentric logic embedded in the assorted images, references and styles. English is devoted to the esthetics of obsessive doodles and loose and lax sketches. Within a single drawing, his work can seem like that of a nerdy, horny schoolboy, an art student scrawling thumbnail figure sketches, an attentive illustrator working from reality and an artist satirizing admiration for naivete.

In Love Comes to an End (2006), one of the large-scale works, English inscribes "you're pretty as long as someone loves you" beneath a leering, bearded man lasciviously leaning forward. To the side of this figure, a small, delicate drawing of a naked man is covered with a wash of pink paint, as if English felt the sketch was inadequate and wished to hide it. In another drawing, he paints a heavy-featured woman along with the words, "I spent years trying to become beautiful, it isn't as easy as it looks."

An aspect of English's allure is the attractively old-fashioned appearance of his drawings. Though he interweaves quotes from recent pop songs and a nude sketch of British celebrity soccer player Wayne Rooney, his drawings have the anachronistic charm of Edward Gorey illustrations. This effect is heightened by the rosy, Victorian blush of his paper, a discontinued brand that English paid homage to by including its vague-sounding name, Banks Cream, in the show's title. One hopes that English will convince the company to reissue the paper, just as he resurrects lost images, connects loose references and makes beauty from pictorial chaos.

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