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"Mark Spitz" (detail) is a total fuckin' hottie. Feel Me You Ought' a Be In Pictures at the Lizabeth Oliveria Gallery through February 2 By Kelly Eginton The three artists involved here, Rob Conger, Steve DeFrank, and Jason Mecier, build up pictures, more specifically portraits, by producing intense optical effects that command attention. Urges to read or interpret these works are suppressed by their psychedelic presence, lending to a more sensory, experiential viewing of the work. It's all about where you stand in relation to the thing on the wall. DeFrank's fantastically colorful Lite Brite renderings on linen and black velvet (yeah!) appear as vivid hallucinations or shimmering mirages. They translate pointillism and concepts of painting as essentially color and light with brilliant stupidity. A complex process of rendering a subject in paint and then redoing it in hundreds of little hand-dyed pegs stacks on another level of freakiness. Talk about freaky, "Mom and Dad" (mostly Dad) recalls Life Drawing 101 with an awkward overkill of a rendering of the folks posed nude ... tan lines, body hair, and weird proportions; it's perfectly strange. The portraits of Fisher-Price Little People dressed up all fag-style like Village People are borderline psychotic in their demonstration of creativity. The rendering of "Hank" clad in leather with chest hair and a mustache drawn on with a Sharpie running out of ink is stupifyingly surreal. Conger's large hook-rug portraits of Alan Greenspan appear elegantly simple by contrast. The folkiness of these expertly made rug tapestries reach sophistication through the ridiculousness of the subject. There's a dopey sense of beauty about depicting Mr. Greenspan just kind of like he looks on CNN. "Alan Greenspan Attentive" is frozen in a moment of conversation. He's smiling; he's listening. He tilts his head a little. He's kinda sexy. So fuzzy. The smaller of the pieces, "Bearish Al," achieves monsteresque abstraction up close, little red pieces of rug turn Al into a grody pimple face. "Alan Greenspan Praying" interprets his generic intellectual posturing, fingertips pressed together at his chin, as lovely transcendental absurdity. Mecier stands apart from Conger and DeFrank with a more collaged imaging of his subjects. "Rod Serling," made up of gadgety junk-drawer stuff -- protractors, pens, paperclips, and whatnot -- has kind of a you-are-what-you-eat mentality going on. A subject composed of things that kind of have its essence is a novel idea that imparts a funky feeling. The face of "The Rock" is a little harder to make out, with a clunky construction of slapped on WWF dolls, packages of Cornnuts, remote controls, and other 7-11 crapola. But stand back from it and you'll get his trademark one-eyebrow-up smarm. It's pretty amazing, the depth of expression achieved with such clutter. Bringing these artists together was a good idea. All three demonstrate a common pursuit of truly visual work that overtly addresses the viewer and delivers satisfaction: What you see is what you get, plus. And thinking of art in simpler terminology, like picture making, lends a sense of freedom to the whole enterprise that can be empowering for artists and viewers alike. Keep it simple, stupid. [ East Bay | Metroactive | Archives ]