Michael Bevilacqua at Deitch Projects

Art in America, Feb, 2005 by Sarah Valdez

Michael Bevilacqua's slick, eye-assaulting paintings have, in the past, appropriated everything from high-end fashion labels to modernist artworks and insignia of punk bands. Weaving his favorite cultural products into a kind of fantasy landscape for a shopping spree, the artist seems unconcerned that his agenda might be construed as vacuous, and does not distinguish, for that matter, between what's art and what's not. For Bevilacqua, who is also a D J, sampling counts as creativity.

Bevilacqua's latest exhibition, "Beyond and Back," included four big canvases in his throbbing color schemes, as well as four prints painted over acrylic, and a real-life fiberglass race car cobbled together from parts of various makes. The hot rod was plastered with decals, among them some that reproduced the paintings on the wall. The decals looked good, and less self-important than the canvases; they seemed capable of turning up anywhere, at any size, with equal success. One assumes Bevilacqua purchased the rest of this impressive array of stickers at indie record stores or on Websites. Most represent not-especially-mainstream music groups from the 1980s, like Sisters of Mercy, Joy Division and Minor Threat.

In the psychedelic painting Busy, Busy, Sunny Day (2003), viewers may or may not catch the reference made in a sign painted with the words "Locals Only" (alluding to an album by the Surf Punks). In the same work we get a cartoonish, fragmented palm tree as well as half a sunflower and an upside-down rainbow. A purple cow patterned with black flowers grazes on a minty-green knoll. Logos for such groups as the Cramps and the Ramones hover in what one might call air, were air powder-pink.

Where viewers would probably be familiar enough with the fashion labels for Helmut Lang or Louis Vuitton that have shown up in Bevilacqua's past work, here the invocation of Emily the Strange, who appears in the prints, is more likely to go unrecognized. A 13-year-old cartoon character who dresses only in black, however, she exemplifies Bevilacqua's ethos; her inventors describe this waifish, sullen creature as "anti-cool, a subculture of one, a follower of no one but herself ... the anti-hero for the Do It Yourself movement."

Like punk, Bevilacqua's work champions the scrappy and irreverent, but it's also fickle and precious; it promotes fancy cultural commodities that depend on the mainstream market. And Bevilacqua cheerfully embraces the somewhat dark, postmillennial assumption that identity and consumption are one and the same.