Jason Fox at feature

Art in America, June-July, 2005 by Steven Vincent

Right now, across America, teenage boys obsessed with black clothing, nihilistic rock bands and disquieting metaphysical philosophies are dreaming of careers as serial killers, computer hackers or--if they're like Jason Fox--artists. Combining elements of doodling, underground comics and tattoos, Fox limns the weltanschauung of young, alienated, down-market males seemingly trapped between adolescent fantasies of possessing super powers and the reality of their jobs at convenience stores. The results are paintings whose cartoony flatness and limited palette seem the tools of a frustrated prophet with great revelations to bring to mankind--if only his parents hadn't grounded him for the weekend.

In his latest show of eight acrylic canvases and one sculpture, the 41 -year-old Fox continued his misfit rebelliousness. In Jeff (2004), for example, he began to render one of his trademark long-haired males with featherlike brushstrokes and an orange glaze, only to seemingly lose interest and affix an orange Styrofoam ball for the nose. This same whiff of juvenile boredom and self-sabotage is evident in Prince Andrei (2003), which depicts in red acrylic a cross-eyed, befuddled-looking combination of Frankenstein and a Russian hussar, whose own Styrofoam schnozz looks more clownish than clever.

For this kind of antiart to work, of course, the artist must signal that he struggles to achieve such self-deprecating effects. Fox succeeded in the show's best offerings--for example, an untitled work from 2002 showing a faceless golemlike figure surrounded by infernal black flames. (Three paintings from that year, all black-and-white, lack titles, as if Fox couldn't be bothered to devise names.) In Sleeping Freak (2004), pale orange lines on a faded blue background portray a Hitlerlike image by way of Planet of the Apes and, perhaps, the costume of Captain America. The other two black-and-white paintings--showing an ape and a man, respectively, both evidently behind bars--seemed underdeveloped. Likewise half-articulated, though to different effect, was the sculpture Monument for Destruction (2004). Here, a pair of concrete and resin legs, rooted to the floor by oversize clown (or Frankenstein) boots, rise to a bloody waist and exposed ruddy spine, the rest of the figure having been severed.

The prevailing air of distraction was unfortunate, for Fox may have something important to say. Monstrous imagery percolates through his work, as does the theme of dismemberment. These converge in the painting Live at Golgotha (2004), a life-size depiction of an orange-Afroed musician wearing clown shoes and strumming a stylized guitar. The figure's arms and hands seem assembled or stitched together, as if in some scientific or medical experiment--or, as the title suggests, a miracle of resurrection. The image is ambiguous, but given Fox's eccentricities, one wonders if, as is true of some real adolescents, beneath his slacker posturing there lurks a true spiritual vision.