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Nicholas Sperakis at Mitchell Algus
Art in America, Jan, 2008 by Susan Rosenberg
Now living in Bogota, Colombia, Nicholas Sperakis (b. 1943) was a member of Rhino Horn, a New York-based neo-expressionist group of the early '70s that was dedicated to an art of social critique and the human figure. Sperakis's paintings are confrontational, a quality that stood out in the intimate setting of the Algus gallery space. Marat Writing His Letter to the People of France (1967) was the earliest piece encountered in this show of paintings and works on paper, 1967-71. A pictorial response to Peter Weiss's play of the same year, Marat/Sade, the painting depicts a sadomasochistic act performed by a pile of clowns under the impassive gaze of Jean-Paul Marat, portrayed as a saint and scholar.
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All the paintings on view envisioned grotesque psychic underworlds, scenes of sex and violence glimpsed behind closed doors. These macabre spectacles of human behavior ranged from the simple grimace of a general's contorted face to the awkward multifigural seduction scene, Pink Striped Suit Pig Man's Descent into the Carnival of Anguish (1971). Here, two figures are watched over by three silently reproachful oversize primitive masks, sentinels of an older and purer time. The woman, wearing a wildly striped, body-length leotard, toys with a colorfully patterned armadillo. The man's striped suit is textured in a relieflike technique using dense, diverse materials--oil, Lucite and coffee grounds--that have the consistency of granular cake icing.
In The Bald Eagles, General (1968) and The Pink Striped Suit Bird Man Driving His Gold Sports Car with His Silver Heel Raised On High (1969), paint is treated as an amalgam to be carved and modeled or laid down in blobs that look like they are squeezed straight from the tube. The resulting raw-looking, distorted faces coexist with thick, geometrical patterns, flat color and reflective silver paint. Sperakis's dissonant vision fuses allusions to Kokoschka, Dubuffet and Rouault, among others. His gritty, antiformalist figurative expressionism conjures up affinities with earlier artistic undergrounds while speaking to revivals of expressionist figuration in painting today.--Susan Rosenberg
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