Mike Cockrill at 31 Grand

As John Waters aficionados know, the world suffers no dearth of suburban camp: fortunately, painter Mike Cockrill enlivens his vision of split-level homes and station wagons with smart painterly skills and wicked nostalgia for the Camelot years. Using ragged brushwork and a palette as faded as a Saturday Evening Post cover, he mixes 1960s prosperity and Catholic piety with a kind of unwholesome prurience that grooves on Sis's underpants and Mom's high heels. Think "Leave it to Beaver" by way of Picabia and Balthus.

In the roughly 5-foot-square oil painting Nativity (all works 2004), a rosy-cheeked lad paints a soap-box flyer; on the wall behind him is a picture of the family pooch. Upending the Norman Rockwelllike scene, however, is a scantily clad pubescent girl curled on the floor watching kittens lap from a bowl of milk. As with most of his larger canvases, Cockrill breaks the integrity of the pictorial space with floating images of Kennedy-era motifs--in this case, Dad in his favorite chair, a haloed Jesus, a squadron of F-86 Saber jets. In Men with Arrows, a tousle-haired youngster ponders the cleavage and shapely gams of his young mom as she squats to pick up laundry; behind them hover images of an upscale tract home and a Mercury capsule parachuting into the sea. Cockrill's images of suburban psychosexuality lack the narrative ambiguities of Eric Fischl's, but they are funnier, more rooted in the dentist-office moralism of Boy's Life and Highlights magazine and--as far as his figures go--more engagingly painted.

This last point is evident from Cockrill's portraits, which, like camp in general, rely on their creator's mordant self-consciousness to redeem them from flea market stalls. In The White Dress, a refractory little girl wearing a party frock glares at the audience with a nasty expression; the watercolor Not My Rainbow shows an icy WASP princess, irritated, perhaps, by Daddy's refusal to lend her the Cadillac; the small oil-on-canvas Girl with Halo contains the demure countenance of the saintly Girl Next Door.

But the high point of the show was the 66-by-50-inch painting Ascension. Here, the image of a Marilyn Monroe look-alike wearing a negligee and stewardess cap rises above a Lockheed Constellation, her archetypal majesty lauded by choirboys and adoring young girls; meanwhile, ranch homes and putting greens situate us firmly in the bourgeois heartland. Like all camp masterworks, beneath the nudge-and-wink, Ascension evinces a love for its subject matter: here is the Great American Goddess, lowbrow sister to both Venus rising on her half-shell and Mary on her crescent moon. Rarely have the friendly skies looked so alluring, whimsical and just a wee bit smutty.

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COPYRIGHT 2005 Gale Group