You don’t need to read the press release to know that Russell Crotty has outer space on the brain. The work currently on view at Shoshana Wayne Gallery was inspired by a residency at an observatory, and it shows. In mixed media paintings from the last two years, a decidedly retro-futurist lexicon of images, unconventional materials, and atmospheric evocations emerges which combines Crotty’s acknowledged drawing practice with a moody colorism and a disrupted, topographical surface plane.

Crotty combines perspectives from the celestial to the intimate, describing scenes depicting schematics of the cosmos, the landscape, the built environment, and the imagination, along with meteorological phenomena. The objects (buildings and spacecrafts, mostly) have a retro-futurist quirk evoking vintage Eastern European cartooning, with a certain aesthetic affect of Terry Gilliam and H.G. Wells. There is almost always a horizon line so that even with the pervading alien planet quality the compositions remain tethered in a familiar sense of space. This is immediately subverted in the most delightful way, as the shapes reveal their construction — elements of pure color, pattern, texture, and original ink drawings all collaged into functional building blocks of the hero objects.

Russell Crotty, The Data Server Conundrum (2019), 48” x 48” x 2.” Ink, acrylic, fiberglass, and tinted bio-resin on paper on wood. Courtesy of Shoshana Wayne Gallery.

“The Data Server Conundrum” (2019) and others whose figures contain nested scenes slice like vitrines into a cross-section of vignettes from nature and city, like string theory erector sets. These are dense with striations like scrimshaw, at counterpoint with the raw silkiness of the gradient speckled skies, mottled with looming weather events, and particulate fields. “Gamma Ray World 48:1” (2018) with its yellow, irradiated atmosphere is a rare but welcome spot of vibrant color among the dominant palette of slate and sepia.

Russel Crotty, Gamma Ray World, (2018), 48” x 48” x 2.” Ink, acrylic, plastic, fiberglass, and tinted bio-resin on paper on wood. Courtesy of Shoshana Wayne Gallery.

All the work is labeled, “Ink, acrylic, plastic, fiberglass, and tinted bio-resin on paper and wood,” and the deal with the crushed plastics and the bio-resin coating is that they both serve to streamline and interfere with the works’ surfaces. A refractive, lightly textured skin creates a more organic, variegated version of a resin topcoat, while plastic tucked behind it creates sculptural translucent topography. There are resonances with the materiality of that other space-obsessed crew, the Light and Space artists; but it’s Crotty, so the primacy of drawing, mark-making, and phantom-edged collage keeps the celestial vision tethered to the earth vis the hand of the artist.

Russell Crotty: Paintings Distant and Perilous
Shoshana Wayne Gallery, West Adams
October 20 – December 21, 2019
shoshanawayne.com