Cole’s work is neither carefree nor innocent

Kenny Cole is not just starting out in art or life, and his 11 paintings a The Private Gallery in Jane Sanford’s barn in Belfast (338-3854, for an appointment) are neither carefree nor innocent, but I think they are quite good. Cole’s work has an acidic, even bitter edge. The wide eyes of innocence, Cole seems to say, got lost some time ago behind the reflecting shades of pretense. The sturdy roof has been torn off our once guiless earthly orphanage by a hurricane of deceit.

In Cole’s world, there is no way back to the halcyon days. The observer is shocked or rueful but, like Adam or Eve, never free once knowledge has knocked him in the head. However wise one seems to himself, he is an accessory to civilization’s dwindling spiral by his participation in the relentless march of consumption. For Cole, irony rules the wicked every day.

Cole lives in Monroe and is a wood worker and carpenter by trade, an artist by training and temperament. He exhibited a number of paintings a year or so ago at Bell the Cat in Belfast. He works in ink, colored pencil and watercolor and paints in a faux primitive style, conflating plainly drawn figures, stiff under the weight of their predicament, with a sophisticated use of cartoon and painting space.

Some of his imagery of that first show reappears in new variations here. His mind seems to be aching with the things he’s got to say, outrages about the commoditization of innocence, the commercialization of tragedy, the self-righteous, often violent, piety that accompanies zeal of all stripes. As strongly as he decries these, he seems also to hold out for the real possibility of personal epiphany. Saints do show up now and then in various guises. George Foreman renounces crime; Ranger Rick, the environmentalist Raccoon, fights for justice.

Cole’s imagery is a developing iconography drawn from visual puns, the daily news, a lurid imagination and his critique of contemporary culture. A cougar attacks an intently sweating jogger in Los Angeles. Similarly, a griffin attacks a running man with deer antlers. Two stags lock horns as a hunter takes easy aim at them both. The cougar has many disguises. Big finned cars emitting miasmas of rank colored gas idle in the streets sporting bumper stickers which, instead of exhorting, “Visualize World Peace” say “Visualize Hell”. And Cole does.

One painting is titled “The Day After the O.J. Verdict, Hurricane Opal Hits Florida Near Pensacola – A Category 3 Hurricane on the Saffir-Simpson Scale. This Painting Was Conceived at 10:20 a.m., Oct. 4, 1995. Opal At This Time Was About 210 Mile S. SW of Pensacola Traveling N. NW at 29 MPH”. In the center of the widening gyre of a hurricane, a big, passive human eye looks on a swirling welter of blackened cultural icons. The nude Bobbits, wounded (never again Iron) John chasing knife-wielding (Runs With Wolves) Lorena, who discards John’s finest past a smiling Griffin and into a maelstrom. The inevitable jogger with a Walkman is oblivious to that always air-borne cougar. O.J. in his helmet with his knife is chasing a runner who blindly holds the Scales of Justice. The Griffin, the abortion clinic murderer, is smiling as its laser gaze bores three holes into the back of a falling man. A penguin in a top hat, a rotted stump, Joe Camel on water skiis, all bound together in the hurricane by a long rope of lies. This is a hurricane that has already engulfed us. Is there any insurance for this kind of thing?

I’m reminded of the Wallace Stevens poem, “Frogs Eat Butterflies. Snakes Eat Frogs. Hogs Eat Snakes. Men Eat Hogs.” Watch out for the food chain; consumption is both the law and the sentence. Deceit is at the throat of sincerity. Innocents and predators dance always within each other’s reach. Out of the radio of a red truck in the painting, “Parking Lot, April 1996”, comes the word balloon, “…but we’re talking about Charles Manson, not O.J….”

Cole paints an intentionally disjointed apace which, like collage, flips quickly from thought to reality, each thought at least as visually potent as the realities of street and building against which they play. He works with symbols, using them to invent morality plays for today’s Belfast and beyond. In them, he communicates his fears, judgments and observations of unfairness, predation, innocence and sincerity. His juxtapositions of sound bites and gnawed thoughts from the day’s dumpster full of news are like collage, also. If there’s a problem with these works, it’s that they sometimes can become preachy or didactic, too unrelentingly pessimistic. Cole deals wit the bleaker truths.

Cole sees a disturbed world full of contradiction, dark humor and reason for despair. His quirky, narrative technique calls innocence to mind, while the imagery crackles with warnings of an Armageddon that seems oppressively upon us. They are wacky but serious fun where the laughs actually sometimes hurt.

Alan Crichton