Mind Melting

I had fallen into step behind a woman wearing a boxy red duffle coat with a blown-up houndstooth pattern; when she slowed to double-check the address of the gallery on Grand Street, I realized we were headed to the same place. She turned out to be a friend of a friend who had apparently passed along word of the opening reception of Mark West: Surviving Logic at a83 to a small posse.

The bonhomie contrasted with the dark matter inside: haunted scenographies in graphite grayscale, grotesque abstractions, often of indeterminate scale and largely devoid of people. Dripping with technical prowess, West’s dreary hallucinations reference the ruptured tectonics of Lebbeus Woods as much as the hazy photorealism of Gerhard Richter and especially recall the libidinal ligaments of Max Ernst and, disparately, H.R. Giger. Many of these drawings date to the 1980s. By contrast, the trippy photo collages West began making around 2011 have a Google DeepDream veneer that prompts comparison to the digital mulch churned out by DALL-E and Midjourney.

An architect by training and formerly a professor by trade, West is an obscure figure. No one I spoke to had heard of him, though googling eventually turned up a website with a Wayback Machine-via-Wix aesthetic that doubles as an archive. (West, who graduated from Cooper Union in 1980, “kept most of his graphic work secret for years,” a83 co-founder Owen Nichols later told me.) The downscaled JPGs hardly do justice to the richness and tactility of the physical pieces, however. In person, works like Stuffies — I Want Them All (2014) scramble signals in the neocortex. Musing on the large, colorful work depicting inscrutably rendered plush toys, a fellow gallery-goer murmured, “These are crazy.” Even as he voiced his preference for the grittier Alive-Alive-O (2021), which hung on an adjacent wall, thought seemed to fail him. “It’s like watching TV,” he said. “I could just look at it.”