The Brooklyn Rail

Francesco Igory Deiana began putting together the group show Spirit Sink as a young kid who found himself stranded on the west coast of America after coming to the country from Italy. The show represents the group of friends that he searched for and found as he got his bearings, and it reveals that the artist-curator is able to move through multiple communities, forming friendships among artists whose work spans many different genres. Spirit Sink ends up with a group of practices that extend out from Op art, to street art, to West Coast funk, but it finds balance on this off-centered ground. Each artist reveals their own attraction to surprising creative choices and subversive forms of illusion that stop just short of incoherence, instead resting at new angles of perception.

At the entrance of the gallery is a work by Deiana himself, “SMOKE AND MIRRORS” (2024), that initiates the viewer into the illusionary tricks they will encounter throughout the show. All is not as it seems in this work, a painting of an open sky mostly concealed behind an illusionistic Op art interface. It is a compressed tautology of shape, a Mobius strip that winds and undoes its own structural logic in a curious formal operation of deception. Each line of its geometric framework bends backwards and winds forward, forming moments of optical doubt that are difficult to catch hold of. The rigid structure also describes a flickering optical space that owes its vibration to its hard edge handling: it unsettles itself. Elsewhere in the gallery is a similarly misfiring machine. Sahar Khoury’s sculptural assemblage Untitled (Holder of green and red stripes with belts) (2020) suggests practical utility—perhaps as a storage space or organizer—but ultimately refuses it. Resembling a brutalist clothes washer or craggy noodle maker, it's strapped with thin belts that do nothing to hold it together, but are threaded through the wobbly holes that swiss cheese the fossil-like surface of the object. This thing feels as though it could turn on at any moment, or burst apart, or maybe it works slowly and steadily, taking eons to do nothing but hum at a frequency too low for us to hear.

Alicia McCarthy’s Untitled (2024) starts with a soft grid of bricks towards the bottom of the canvas. Above, we find drips and splatter, a transgressive move in comparison to the arrangement of quadrilaterals below. It is simple in its perversity—how rare it is to see the artist compelled to make a grid also Pat Steir-ing it up at the top of the image. The painter introduces a fractured subjectivity within herself, within the painting, warping the structured norms of the grid into aleatory and unedited imperfection. The reintroduced hand is a clumsy one, and not self-serious, introducing the kind of tactile mistake that has long been absent from the precision of those coming out of Neo-Geo. Like other works in the exhibition, McCarthy chooses inclination over cliché and refuses any hint of either genre or the limitations that accompany them. Why can’t the straight line be wobbly like the strays from a shaking paint can mixer or a blender with the lid left off of it? The Apollonian is getting a little sauced and even rigidity of form needs to relax at the end of the day.

The two paintings by Chris Lux, Flower Man (2024) and The Sweep (2024), reveal another habitual line crosser here. Both works feel like they are transported in from another reality of painting. The shapes of Lux’s figures look cut out with construction paper, the clunky cutting making it difficult to see clearly. The ground of Flower Man is just as strange, a soft pink streaked on thinly. These paintings remind me of fall calendars that were handed out when I was in elementary school, or paintings made by someone still using punch-card computers, safety scissors, and thick paper. It is a painting-as-zine aesthetic, evoking the feeling of scanning and printing at a Kinko’s late at night.

Spirit Sink evokes the image of a mess of dishes that somehow adds up to inexhaustible meaning. It's like the rainbow in the spill, the aura of a bad joke, the hope for a kind of accidental transcendence. There is an order hidden within the backyard littered with solo cups and empties after a party, something earnest to be found in the afterthought, a kind of grace found in meeting others along the way and finding that all those connections have added up to something important. Each artist included here feints and ducks, a classroom with only class clowns. Spirit Sink has levity where it is needed as well as coolness and poise. Each artist finds their own way of searching for meaning below the static. As each work barely syncs up with the next at the conceptual margins, their asynchronicity becomes a kind of harmony, an inside joke among the artists, a word spoken out of context that brings a laugh or a nod of recognition. Across their disparate practices is a suspicion of doing things straight up. There’s got to be a trick to pull off, a stunt or a well-timed prank that loosens up the shoulders of everyone there—a cannonball in the pool that gets everyone else ready to jump in after.