KENNY SCHARF

Bridging the crepuscular span between Surrealism and Pop, Scharf’s playground of imagination addresses the zodiacal year of the dragon (2024), along with our renewed election cycle. As MYTHOLOGEEZ makes clear, Scharf’s visionary imagery has proven indomitable. Like hieroglyphs, the message he has come to express through his figures has transmogrified into a kind of sacred writ, transcending conventional pictorial values and drawing to themselves a host of associations and meanings.

Paintings like DRAGONÉ BeBONGO (2024) have a foreboding, archetypal quality—at once highly stylized and numinous. Scharf traces his dragons back to their ancestral meaning, where, etymologically, the word for “serpent” combines with “one who sees.” Like graffito spacecraft made up of tapestries of words, these paintings indirectly comment on the sacred and auspicious aspects of dragons. Other works, such as L R R L (2024), carry more politicized connotations—with the yin/yang contrast of red and blue elements veering in tangential directions. In a crucial election year, however many allusions Scharf’s works might suggest, they’re able to accomplish this because they exist in their own paradisal rondure, with their own language and symbolism.

In MONSATO! (2024), Scharf’s unique handling of surreality elides into trompe l’oeil elusiveness. Here, the biological aspect of his motifs comes more to the fore. The exuberant energy of the work charts a state of perpetual emergence, as the viewer’s line of sight sees at one moment individual figures, at another the holistic gestalts these figures give way to. Whether we’re situated at the center of the earth, or at the core of a kaleidoscopic sun, makes little difference. The point is to collapse the distinction between microcosm and macrocosm, the popular and profound, avant-gardism and kitsch.

In part, what makes Scharf’s iconography so universal is the way it parallels familiar aspects of pop culture, without actually reproducing it. Far from being didactic, his paintings intrinsically speak to matters concerning ecology, consciousness, and being. Scharf’s entities, attached to visages that suggest human feelings, are neither germs nor cells, properly speaking; and their cosmic adventuring moves past anything that can be encompassed by human sentiment. Using his otherworldly figures as vehicles, he flies past the outer limits of our culture, revealing an animistic universe that is utterly joyous.