Chris Hammerlein at Derek Eller - New York - drawings and sculptures - Brief Article

Exhibitions of drawings arranged in busy clusters or hung salon-style have become a contemporary trope, intended to win over viewers through sheer exuberance and high volume. Chris Hammerlein--based in New York for the past few years after getting his start in Los Angeles--is perhaps the moment's most ecstatic engineer of this kind of installation. Exploiting art-historical references, religious iconography and loopy, self-conscious humor, he maps out an introspective world with the wild-eyed, expressionistic fervor of a punk Blake. His range was evident in a recent show of 56 drawings fortified with two bronze sculptures (all works 2001).

Across an untitled drawing of a raging campfire, Hammerlein scrawls with colored pencils, "Remember YOUR feelings," a sentiment that clearly stokes his efforts. Many of the works transform traditional religious imagery, as if to indicate a crisis of faith. An ethereal figure in one drawing sports a radiant halo, while two stigmata spout circular trails of red that are like traces from a fireworks sparkler. Another work depicts Eve astride a crowned serpent from whose mouth she takes the apple. Enlivened by bursts of oil-stick color, these pumped-up, allegorical scenes were scattered among other more sardonic sketches, including a self-parodic depiction of the painter as a wreath-wearing, pompous esthete. Several were more conventionally "badboy" in tone, such as a loosely rendered nude with a yellow, smiley-face head, a huge member and a finger pointed Uncle Sam-style next to an inscription reading "Don't forget to suck my dick."

Seemingly emblematic of Hammerlein's art-world j'accuse is a drawing of a shaggy-haired Cyclops lying prone with jeans undone and Michelangelo's Dying Slave rising between his legs. But even as he mocks the hubris of art-making, Hammerlein can seem to embrace esthetic aspiration with an almost fin de siecle trembling. I Am the True Vine is a gorgeously effete, Beardsleyesque, nearly 3-foot bronze sculpture of a supplicant ephebe wearing a laurel crown, his thin arms upraised. This yearning Romanticism was countered, though not canceled, by a nearby rendering of an obese figure who lies fallen, losing blood, one grasping arm reaching forward, with a caption above that reads "Idiot." Hammerlein's insistent fervor gives his work an unexpected coherence. His neo-symbolist, gently ironic mode of art worship seems right for the post-postmodern age.

COPYRIGHT 2002 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group