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 formerl…