Courtesy Pravus Gallery, Phoenix

Colin Chillag, I’m an Evolutionary Biologist (2008). Acrylic on canvas, 73 x 62 in.

December 2008 Reviews

Street Art, Street Life

Third Guangzhou Trennial

Charles Avery

Swoon

Martin Ramirez

Richard Kern

The Greenroom

Bending the Word

Robert Motherwell

I Am Never At Home

Mr.

Mike Kelley Conversation with RoseLee Goldberg The Museum Gala You Will Never See Again Dreaming the Future The Collector Performa 09 Is Trying to Seduce You Inside Man Editor's Letter

Send a letter to the Editor

Save to Del.icio.us Digg this

his recent show of 12 biologically oriented paintings, the Phoenix-based painter Colin Chillag presented an outlandish depiction of human evolution. I'm an Evolutionary Biologist (2008) chronicles man's passage from ape to human being in a style that is a cross between Mike Kelley and Sir Jon Tenniel. Sperm belches through cartoonish black holes that are interspersed among the branches of a heavily ornamented, archetypal Tree of Life. Cat heads, birds, fish, dogs in all shapes and sizes, and other odd life forms populate the Tree. Labels characteristic of 19th-century biology identify cartoonish slime as "jawless fishes," "monotremes," "nematodes," "crustaceans," "marsupials," and "sponges." Tangled bundles of worms drown beneath vegetation and the whole mess is topped off by a yellow canary trapped by a surreal, squirting cluster of eyeballs sitting on a human brain.

Nocturne in Orange and Green (2008) is set outside the 7-Eleven, its parking lot and gas pumps suffused in an eerie, fluorescent glow. The Hopperesque moodiness of the scene is intensified as one follows the hand-pressed, impasto paint as it abruptly gives way to a blank gessoed canvas, onto which Chillag sketches in pencil or lightly paints a science textbook diagram that depicts how gas is extracted from petroleum. The shift is indicative of Chillag's ability to negotiate between linear narrative and stasis, leading us on wild journeys into the bizarre.

"Colin Chillag" originally appeared in the December 2008 / January 2009 issue of Modern Painters. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Modern Painters' December 2008 / January 2009 Table of Contents.