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'Fear No Art 4' at Fourth Wall

By GREG COOK  |  November 26, 2012

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A highlight of "Fear No Art 4," the Fourth Wall Project's exhibit "promoting and exposing underground art" is organizer Marka27's own paintings. The New Yorker, formerly of Boston, deploys a crackerjack illustration style in graphic paintings riffing on geishas or traditional tribal masks. He augments them with actual shoelaces and parts of Air Jordans to create street totems.

Among the other 16 artists, from Miami to LA, are Kenji Nakayama of Boston and Caleb Neelon of Cambridge, who are more talented than their paintings indicate. Too many of the artists favor show-offy visual posturing. And LA's Simone Legno's catchy painting of an anime gal reading manga comics — in just panties, and on her hands and knees in a fuck-me pose — reminds that lowbrow and street art can be dudes' worlds.

But Wombat, a New Yorker formerly in Boston, makes cool pop dioramas referencing Robotech, Lego, and old monster movies. Raul Gonzalez's drawings, made to look old-timey with lots of faux stains, depict a man, a boy, and a girl floating down a river in tires, or a boy's head attached to a rattlesnake. The Medford artist's symbolism is unclear — maybe something about growing up Mexican American in Texas? — but his cartoony draftsmanship is some of the best of this style that you'll find in the country.-

FEAR NO ART 4 Fourth Wall Project, 132 Brookline Ave, Boston :: Through December 3

Related: Alex Lukas’s post-apocalyptic landscapes, plus the New Topographics of Barbara Bosworth and Stephen Tourlentes, Mark Morris's Socrates, The Muir, and Festival Dance, The ‘2012 RISD Graduate Thesis Exhibition’, More more >
  Topics: Museum And Gallery , STREET ART, Fourth Wall, galleries,  More more >
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