Varnish Fine Art is a classy little joint, with exposed brick walls, industrial steel walkways, and a wine bar, tucked away on Natoma Street behind the SFMOMA and the Academy of Art University. True to its environs, Varnish specializes in marketable, illustrative art. I personally do not take issue with this, as the work is conceptually accessible and skillfully executed. Along with Lisa Dent and 111 Minna, Varnish is capitalizing on the nearby expansion of the Museum District and hoping to pick up some walk-through traffic. The spaces in this neighborhood are for-profit and it shows, but this seems appropriate for downtown. At the very least these venues are making the neighborhood a fair bit more interesting.

Rapid Eye Movement presents six painters and draftsmen whose comics-inspired imagery owes a lot to the Lowbrow movement. Attaboy, Chris Mars, Kevin Peterson, KRK Ryden, Sean Christopher and Dave Chung all work in the vein of the contemporary grotesque, pushing figuration into the realm of horror. Of the six, I found Chris Mars the most compelling. His oil on wood paintings and photographic manipulations show mutated leftovers of human beings, gathered in a postapocalyptic urban carnival that doubles as a charnel house. The black and white silver gelatin prints make the influence of photographers including Weegee, Diane Arbus and Joel-Peter Witkin apparent, but the images really come alive in the colorful oil paintings Consecration of the Tin Seer and Expelling the Mind Lilliputians (both 2004). The compositions are stilted—maybe deliberately so—and come to resemble a group of deranged family portraits. The beauty is in the details: alternately waxy and saggy skin textures and flayed zombie features, from which an uncanny freakshow sexuality emerges.

Kevin Peterson’s oil on wood paintings reduce human flesh to meat, sectioned like a diagram of a slaughterhouse cow. The effect may border on the obvious, but is nonetheless apt considering the callousness with which we accept both knee-jerk militarism and abject poverty in the midst of our affluent society. Peterson’s is a Surrealist practice that illustrates a psychosexual landscape, paying homage to the tradition on which he draws with The Exquisite Corpse (2006). Other works such as Balsamic Pompadour and Attitude Adjustment Hat (both 2005) combine graphic horror with tongue-in-cheek humor to a nice effect.

Attaboy, an established comics artist and toy designer, here presents a wall of ink on paper drawings of insects with vaguely human faces. My favorites among them are the series of feminized octopi, with titles like Octo-Fem: Hairy Girl Cephalopod (2005). Both gruesome and cute, they have tarantula fur and wide, almond-shaped eyes. Their pursed lips, nearly kissable, smirk tauntingly. The otaku’s simultaneous fear of and fascination with female sexuality has a new gollum in these images. (For those of you less obsessed with Japanese manga than I, an otaku is a person, usually a man, whose entire existence revolves around animated fantasy and who is frequently a shut-in and a social outcast in real life).

At its best, Lowbrow artists employ considerable graphic skill toward sophisticated allegories of the present. They make political statements without browbeating, and indulge sometimes extreme erotic impulses in a way that is safe for human consumption. At its worst, Lowbrow art all starts to look alike, like the fevered scribblings of teenage boys and skateboard airbrush artists elevated to fine art status. Even so, after fifty-plus years of contemporary art bridging the “high” and “low,” to the point where these categories are scarcely worthy of distinction, it puzzles me why these artists still seem relegated to a parallel art world of their own. This kind of work is often doubly criticized for being too commercial and yet not fashionable, but is quite popular once an artist has become established (see Barry McGee or Ed Templeton for proof). Emerging artists working in this vein have historically had a very difficult time breaking into the mainstream art market in San Francisco. For example, Robert Williams (arguably the father of Lowbrow) had to move to LA to be taken seriously as an artist. I fail to see what separates Varnish’s artists so vastly from Jack Hanley artists Keegan McHargue or Peter Saul, for example—other than the fact that they embrace their Lowbrow heritage and invest very little energy in directly chastizing the art market that feeds them.

Varnish has established itself over the past three years as a haven in San Francisco for contemporary artists working outside the Conceptualist mainstream. In particular, glass and metal artists, creators of functional aesthetic objects and illustrative draftsmen now have a consistent gallery. This is unapologetically object-based work bearing no sign of social practice, yet it requires a developed social network to exist all the same. In many ways, the work in Rapid Eye Movement is no different from the genre of Bay Area art that includes alternative-space fixtures Ezra Li Eismont and Oliver Rosenberg, but these two scenes rarely overlap. This underscores the compartmentalization of the Bay Area into a million tiny scenes, each one thoroughly self-interested and isolated. For such a small region, we don’t cooperate nearly as much as we should.

Chris Mars, Expelling the Mind Lilliputians, 2004
Oil on panel
29” x 39”