The Dark Side of Summer
by David Cohen
June 16, 2006

Summer is for group shows in art galleries and innocent family fun on the beach. Right? Not on the second count, if you believe what "Nightmares of Summer," a new group show at Marvelli Gallery, has to say.

"Nightmares of Summer" is co-curated by the somber duo of Marcello Marvelli and his collector friend George Robertson, whose previous collaborations include an investigation of suicide. They have gathered images that reflect “the darkness inherent in all paradigms of light, the dark cloud contained by every silver lining.” Rather than a gothic horror fest, however, this strange gathering is characterized by perverse good cheer. Barnaby Furnas sets the tone with "Holiday" (2005), an angel of the apocalypse masquerading as a child on the beach. Mr. Furnas has made the terrifying exhilarations of battle his distinctive themes in images, often in watercolor, that at first read as joyous exploration of color, and only yield their awesome portents on closer examination. Here a young flesh beauty with gold wings wears a demented expression on her face and splatters what could be blood in all directions. A second image by Mr. Furnas is a glowing red composition that looks a bit like a close-up of a molten oil rig. The image itself isn’t as sinister as the title, "Dead Red" (2005), and the medium: dispersed pigment in urethane and ink on bald calfskin. This keeps company with a pair of nautical drawings by Francesca DiMattio of 19th-century battleships caught in distress. These crackle with a sense of danger that recalls David Fertig’s neo-Romantic Napoleonic battle scenes. Ms. DiMattio’s works in turn flank a dense, brooding charcoal drawing by Steve DiBenedetto, "Untitled (Situation with Octopus)" (1998-2004), in with the octopus looks like he is having a whale of a time.

Nils Karsten’s collages display a macabre sense of humor. Mr. Karsten gives sense of humor. Mr. Karsten gives spiky body hairs to the smooth legs of the appropriated little Victorian girls who populate his ghoulish untitled watercolor and collages of 2006.

In fact, a theme running through this show is the ickiness of sweaty limbs, parched throats, and exposed body parts. Diane Arbus's "Family One Evening at the Nudist Camp, PA" (1965) is an unconvincingly nonjudgmental view of an ill-at-ease, corpulent couple and their child under an ominous sky. The parts and prosthetic limbs in Hans Bellmer’s, "La Poupee" (1935) and the wacko elongations of Andre Kertesz’s "Distortion 28" (1933) – both vintage gelatin-silver prints – find echo in a pair of poignant collages by Robert Beck that focus on press photos of the naked corpse of a murder victim at a gay pickup beach.

Michael St. John brings an "In Cold Blood"-meets-the-Mansons sensibility to his nightmarish evocations of murder. One canvas, "Dead Body Inside" (2006), features the words of the title in a demented scrawl next to a photograph of a forlorn cabin.

The poster girl of the last Whitney Biennial, Marilyn Minter, takes body squalor to Danteen depths in her blown-up C-print deconstructions of the beauty myth. "Soiled" (2000) has copious dirt between a cropped image of lurid, green-painted toenails, while "Drool" (2004) focuses on a menacing, saliva-filled mouth animated by a vampire-like grin.

Some of the remaining images qualify as nightmarish due to guilt by association. Ann Craven's Hallmark-like portrait of two pink birds in a tree and Stuart Elster’s sickly monochromatic seascape at dawn become convincingly nightmarish just by keeping company with obvert horrors.