The Brooklyn Rail

Brooklyn-based Sedrick Chisom’s first solo show in New York features eight large and six small paintings in two rooms on the gallery’s ground floor, and three large charcoal drawings, all dated 2024, along with three vitrines of collected reference materials in the basement. The paintings, in Chisom’s characteristic abstract figuration, are made with either oils or acrylic and a great deal of GAC polymers. Chromatically glowing in jewel tones, the fluid pigment is fixed onto their surfaces with plenty of drip marks and glazes via a process of scrubbing and spraying. Mounted on invisible wooden supports, the deckled edges of unfinished canvas float free from the walls. The pictures bear an immersive beauty that is equal parts elegiac romanticism and macabre. The latter is a product of the subject matter, drawn from a dystopian sci-fi epic Chisom has been imagining into being since he was in the MFA program at Rutgers from 2016-18. The narratives remain deliberately inscrutable, although the pictures have extensive explanatory titles in the mode of 19th-century academic works, and an entrancing neo-symbolist delectability that mediates against absolute literary reference.

Chisom adeptly combines art historical references to produce pictures that convey the feeling of this or that earlier artist, without the literality of earlier paintings that deployed figures from Caravaggio’s Narcissus and the like. He cobbles together Munch, Redon, Maurice Denis, Gauguin, Albert Pinkham Ryder, and other fin-de-siècle painters to convey contemporary psychological intensity through his future-historicist tale of racial tensions. Chisom’s unproduced play, 2200, is a parable about a future earth where people of color have left the planet in search of better worlds and wypipo (white people) have separated the USA into a union of coastal states and a confederacy of flyover states. They preside over both an ecological nightmare and are beset by a disease, revitiligo, that results in their skin darkening, leading to a reprise of racist divisions met with state-sanctioned violence. Humans are turning into monsters and a cataclysm looms on the horizon.

Rather than illustrating the play, the works on view expand its narrative. The back room, with its five large paintings with titles that challenge a reviewer’s allotted word count, resembles displays of historical dioramas—like the set of Revolutionary War scenes of my youth at the Neshaminy Mall in Bucks County, PA. Each diorama had a different color scheme and a few times a day they came to life: the puppet-like figures moving amidst flashing lights. The suggestion of similar pyrotechnics occurs in Medusa Did Not Spread Gangster Rap Lyrics to The Youth of The Southern Cross, but She Did Not Care to Contradict Her Accuser, a Nabis-like, luminous and artificially colored scene of the monstrous gorgon, whose hair can be read as snakes or dreads. We see her from inside a dark room through glazed sliding doors, standing on a shadowed terrace, framed by branches and leaves and with a view over a marmalade lake and sky. The Citizens of The Capitol Citadel Disregarded its Volcanic Tremors Which Could Be Sighted from Several Nautical Miles Away hangs to the right. Shadowy body parts (two heads and an arm) displayed on three spikes break up a composition of rising horizontal layers of grass, sand, surf, sea, and night sky, with a tower in the ocean that is equal parts St. Michael’s Mount and Dragonstone Castle from Game of Thrones. Gorgeous scrims of blues, purples, and deep greens cascade down the surface in drips from every horizontal register, contrasting the implied menace while brilliant points of orange dot the composition.

In tone, setting, and psychological intensity, Chisom’s works recall Munch’s “Frieze of Life” series, exhibited in 1902. But while the Norwegian artist channeled his own experience and thwarted love life in his cycle, Chisom seeks something simultaneously more removed and universal. In A Soldier of the Southern Cross and His Dog Travelled a Hundred Nautical Miles From a Place They Didn’t Belong to Murder the Bog Troll in a Place He Didn’t Belong, an angular spiral of human/canine violence in lower left bears a religious intensity commensurate with Delacroix’s Jacob Wrestling with the Angel with its similarly sylvan backdrop. But Chisom’s scrims of oil interwoven with layers of GAC polymers, what he describes as painting as contamination, read as a driving acid rain in a leafless landscape. In the noble tradition of Albert Cuyp and Theo van Doesburg, a painting of two cows are rendered in Gauguin and Émile Bernard’s cloisonné/synthetist technique of heavy dark outlines and bursts of color. Beneath an irradiated sky, the bovines graze in a field of bones. In Chisom’s play, milk is an elixir thought to fend off the skin pigmentation disease. The cows, with their black-and-white hides, become further symbols of racial strife.

In the front room, a large portrait of bat-eared Confederate General Spectrous Lee is based on Matthew Brady’s 1865 photograph of Robert E. Lee, blended with Nosferatu and Matthew Barney. Chisom adds a molten, Diebenkorn background—one of several variants of Abstract Expressionism that can be traced throughout the show. A small painting titled Prayer of Evil appears to depict a quartet of Klansmen in a crepuscular landscape, a meditation on Norman Lewis’s monochromatic works of the 1960s. Downstairs, an oversized charcoal drawing depicts an “Aged Northern General” whose scalp has burst into flames, like an old photograph whose emulsion has been distressed by heat. There is a similar impulse, here, to Hilary Harkness’s marvelous recent show of fictionalized Civil War pictures, but while she drew on queer narratives and Winslow Homer, Chisom’s work is more like Frank Bowling meets George Miller in a symbolist world of racist terror dominated by Spanish moss. Vitrines contain Chisolm’s sketches, and books like Jean Raspail’s The Camp of the Saints (1973) and John Block Friedman’s The Monstrous Faces in Medieval Art and Thought (2000); pages from 2200; and a reproduction of Brady’s Lee image. Fine fodder for art historians.

Finally, there is Saga of the Swamp Thing, a DC Comics trade paperback, opened up to the concluding splash page of issue 24 (May 1984) of Alan Moore, Stephen Bissette, and John Totleben’s groundbreaking run on that title, with the vegetable/man monster/hero, arms outstretched, in front of a cloud-streaked and blood-red sun, basking in his boggy glory. Like Moore’s conception of a pummeled planet, rampant prejudice, and confrontational violence levied by gorgeous imagery, Chisom’s present show confronts our past butchery, our present and heightened prejudices, and our indeterminate future in alluringly unstable pictures whose sheer force of facture and chromatics suggest art’s means, like the Buddhist reference in the show’s title, to ward off evil and push forwards.