Review Georganne Deen at Babilonia 1808 By Juan Rodriguez As I was walking up the wooden steps of a 122-year-old Victorian house in Berkeley which is mow the recently opened Babilonia 1808 gallery, I imagined the atmosphere of civility that might have once graced its living quarters. But once inside the renovated exhibition space, any imagined pretense for socially acceptable behavior was shattered by the crude cartoon imagery of Los Angeles-based artist Georganne Deen. Deen’s cartoon style was inspired-and is still influenced-by the underground comics movement of the 1970’s. Gary Painter, a significant figure in the painter/cartoonist movement, encouraged Deen to find her voice within this genre when they met back in 1972. The expressive immediacy of cartoons yells emotional as well as artistic truth for Deen. She says that her paintings are expressions of her childhood memories reinforced by her recovery from bouts of depression later on in her life. She articulates her own suffering of women through the comic yet also tragic looking distortions of her cartoon aesthetic. This exhibition is thematically divided into two bodies of work, The Secret Storm and The Vogue Book of the Dead. The work’s placement in Babilonia’s domestic interior enhances the impact of Deen’s work. Her imagery is of a fantastic world that is revealed to children in the safety of their bedrooms. There is a somber and soft tone in Deen’s paintings that give them a dreamy quality reminiscent of the sensation children experience as they begin to drift off to sleep. The paintings in the first gallery make reference to the Bible, ancient myths and children’s fairy tales. The most original images in these paintings are of humanoid vegetation: pea pod people and trees sprouting eyes, hands and legs. But the ubiquitous presence of the cartoon character Casper the Friendly Ghost ironically brings a formally rigorous note to the work. In one painting, titled Fliday, the multiple images of Casper are painted on the canvas but also float outside the supports as thin, rubbery, translucent cutouts of themselves. The effect is dynamic as the curvilinear patches of plastic adhering to the gallery wall give Casper the ephemeral look of a shadow as well as lending him a sense of real weight. Some of the most impressive work in this series are the small figures of women painted on bark paper. My powers!! They’re gone!!! Is a painting of a naked woman with large ears, a baldhead and a large, drooping bosom morphed onto the body of an adolescent. Wavy, radiating lines encircle her body, suggesting the presence of some energy field emanating from inside her, making her appear defiled, like a bodhisattva or the Virgin of Guadalupe. In another bark painting, titled Dangerous Perfume, a woman emits gaseous substances while several dogs standing alongside her raise their noses to inhale her fragrance. In such paintings, Deen seems to suggest that women have tremendous physical powers, which are subject to depletion but can also have an effect of intoxification. The other part of the exhibition, The Vogue Book of the Dead, contains a series of paintings that were done after Deen’s mother passed away. They are centered on an idea of fashion and physical beauty being a mediator between people. The artist has said that “going shopping” is what she and her mother could talk about without getting into a conflict about more serious subjects. Each scene is encircled by an oval shape, done in a soft shade, acting as a framing device. But the oval shape also seems to appear like a mirror which can be a disturbing and cruel filter when held up to a person’s face. The paintings on silk show images of a blind Santa Claus, an elephant and a rabbit dressed in formal attire, an ice cream cone and a couple of humanoid pea pods with briefcases. All of these images look like they were inspired by stuffed animals or plucked from children’s book illustrations and combined with impressions of advertising That might have caught Deen’s eye while she was flipping the pages of fashion magazines. Overall, her images are brutal and direct but they also have delicate features as evidenced in her creatures’ little fingers or the graceful circles surrounding a rabbit’s eyes. But in a deeper sense, Deen’s paintings ask the question: hat is the truth behind images of beauty? Her work addresses this issue in a direct and uncomplicated manner which is representative of her intelligence and wit as a visual artist. back to home page