John Isaacs at Feigen Contemporary - New York

Art in America, May, 2003 by Eleanor Heartney

Part bad-boy perversity, part mock-science, part neo-romantic fantasy, this exhibition of work by British artist John Isaacs presented a mix of themes and mediums that didn't quite coalesce. Nevertheless, individual parts were compelling. Most notable was the grotesquely realistic wax sculpture of a hugely obese, naked man that the artist describes as a self-portrait a la Dorian Gray. The pink fleshy surface erupts with sores, warts and pimples, while folds of fat lap over each other like mounds of cooled volcanic lava. Only the face, hands and feet (cast from Isaacs's body) retain any trace of human likeness, and they are all but over whelmed by the mountains of flab that enfold them.

Other works are only slightly more low-key. Downstairs, an installation titled Dumb Planets Are Round Too (2002) presented a fantasy landscape, complete with twinkling artificial flowers made from optical fibers. A half-constructed papier-mache mountain was lit from within by red light and, in one section, appeared to be metamorphosing into flesh. In the darkened room behind this diorama, a wall-sized video projection showed a seascape of lapping waves. A voice-over in Russian (with subtitles in English) offered an existential meditation on being alone.

Upstairs was The Turning Point (1999), a mock-documentary video chronicling the artist's efforts to discover a link between behavioral changes exhibited by Trinidadian fiddler crabs and their human counterparts at the turn of the millennium. In the end, his findings are inconclusive, but he seems to have had an enjoyable sojourn in the Caribbean.

Rounding out the show was an assortment of small sculptures, paintings and drawings that included a plaster tree with copper leaves growing from a flayed head made of wax, and a photo of a clearly fake arm slathered with red paint, its fingers emblazoned with the word "hate."

The works were presented with the insouciance now identified with younger British artists. As for the exhibition's larger message, is the artist saying hope is an illusion? Science is a joke? It's fun to play with art materials? There are many ideas here, but Isaacs might benefit from choosing to focus on just one.