The Brooklyn Rail

Javier Calleja’s One true tree for… at Almine Rech includes ten acrylic-on-canvas works, a handful of mixed media on paper drawings, and one sculptural installation. The works, all executed within the last year, are of Calleja’s archetypal beady-eyed and spindly bubblegum-bush-haired figures. Some of the figures, such as the recurrent anime-inspired character depicted in Just Be You (2024) and its coeval work on paper, Be you (2024), sport a cactus-bobbed hairpiece. Others, like the rose-cheeked pallid duo of In dreams (2024), have cotton candy bubble crowns foaming into a mound. The Waterboy + Flower Heads (2024) sculpture, of a towering male monument in an orange one-piece jumpsuit reading “1980,” is sequestered in a gallery corner with two bulbous-eyed anthropomorphic shrubs beside it. Each character, usually depicted in portrait from the waist up, sports a faint smirk and watery, shimmering eyes.

Calleja often makes variegated marks beyond the constraints of the canvas and its support, raining droplet bursts of mauve, orchid-lilac, or cyan on the frame, glass, or gallery walls. These pouring trickles are coordinated with the characters’ barbed hair prickles, suggesting their continuity with the environment of their display. The works on paper, such as Mom! (2024) and I see! (2024), similarly fill out space, albeit in a more constrained mode. Here we encounter colorful droplets and brushwork splotches around the doe-eyed characters’ visage, leaving little room for negative space. The occasional speech bubble breaks the fixed assembly of space, with ambiguous remarks like “I SEE ?” or “IN DREAMS” implying an opaque narrative that never quite coheres into a genuine chronicle.

Calleja’s approach has a precedent in the “Superflat” movement founded by Takashi Murakami. However, as he outlines in his 2000 essay, “Sūpā furatto Nihon bijutsuron (A theory of superflat Japanese art)” and a concurrent speech he delivered during Wonder Festival 2000, Murakami’s “Superflat” figurines are idiomatically connected to Japanese Buddhist sculptures. In Calleja’s case, there are more apparent local influences drawn from kitsch art history. These include Margaret Keane’s portraits of large-eyed children. Yet here, too, there is a critical difference. Keane’s burrowed eyes are hauntingly shadowed, her figures stone-cold and tight-lipped. There is a shrillness to them that we do not find in Calleja’s figures, which are more firmly anchored in the effusive and energetic archetypes of manga and anime.

Calleja’s penchant for spaced-out wide eyes and beaming smirks is particularly reminiscent of Yoshitomo Nara egg-headed children. In a 2024 interview with Sasha Bogojev in Juxtapoz Magazine, Calleja indeed cites Nara as one of his primary influences before also listing Philip Guston, René Magritte, and Alex Katz. It is not immediately clear how Guston or Magritte are relevant and, if Katz shares any “family resemblance” to Calleja, it is more so due to their general interest in the portraiture genre—although Katz paints with a significantly firmer realist sensibility than Calleja. In this show, Calleja outlines each character with thick delineated borders, painting his figures’ eyes, hair, and shirt in bright, definite colors. His work is, in its subject matter and painterly style, closest to Ronnie Cutrone’s “post-Pop” approach. This “school” included Kenny Scharf and Keith Haring, but was sometimes extended to include New York graffiti artists and Fashion Moda mainstays like Futura 2000, Daze, and Crash—and, occasionally, New York Neo-Expressionists like Basquiat and Donald Baechler. This coterie frequently made playful cartoonish renderings of characters both invented and appropriated. In particular, Cutrone’s use and re-use of comic figures—most notably, Woody Woodpecker, Felix the Cat, and Mickey Mouse—deployed a kind of epochal nostalgia that went beyond the cold appropriation of his mentor, Andy Warhol. Although Cutrone’s work was also based on found sources, his cartoon characters were steeped in guilelessness and sincerity. John Carlin and Sheena Wagstaff, in their 1983 catalog essay for “The Comic Art Show” at the Whitney Museum, opposed what they termed Warhol’s “ironic conceptionalism” to Cutrone’s “assimilated” cartoons, which they characterized as distinctly earnest, contra traditional Pop art’s more cynical sensibility.

In the early 1990s, Cutrone began creating his own characters—chiefly, “Blaze”, a coral-pink feline figure sporting a denim biker jacket, broad shoulders, and puffed-out chest that was inspired by Tony the Tiger and Chester Cheetah. Calleja, too, is in the business of developing characters, including “Cloud Face”, who sports raindrop eyes and a nimbus cloud for hair. In One true tree for… , there are a number of novel characters, including the moss-haired, orange jumpsuit-adorned protagonist of Waterboy (2024) and 1980 (2024). Calleja, like Cutrone, ascribes an anecdotal quality to his figures, suggesting narratives through their recurrence. But if Cutrone looked towards the nostalgia of cartoon strips and the hip-hop culture of the 1980s and early 1990s, Calleja’s world-making espies a sensibility far looser and more difficult to tether. Certainly, his childlike characters are recognizably influenced by Japanese visual culture though they do not appropriate any particular anime or advertising icon. In turn, Calleja subsumes the aesthetic vernacular charms of post-Pop and kawaii. His sculptures and paintings outstrip any particular historical memory, mandating naïve, child-like viewing rather than contemplation. It would be inappropriate to mine these works for conceptual riches or criticize them for spurning the finer scholarly-didactic pursuits of art history. They are, to put it succinctly, content with being charming.