There's a lot of Picasso going around these days, and the symptoms present themselves clearly in Mark Grotjahn's current show in the downstairs space at Blum & Poe. Here, a baker's dozen of paintings — made from oil paint layered up on cardboard that also has been layered up atop stretched linen — assault you with heavily abstracted and sometimes multiplying eyes that combine with line work to overtly borrow from and reminisce about Picasso's own lifting of styles and moves from "primitive" art. But as Picassoid as they are, Grotjahn's paintings also are reminiscent of work by a number of proto- and early modernists, as well as a host of primitive-by-way-of-Picasso–inspired artists from Klee to Pollock to Basquiat. And as much as Grotjahn's paintings might be considered sums of parts that descend and derive from precedents, they might also be considered as home-radicalized fusions of Grotjahn's own tendencies previously evinced in more disparate bodies of work ranging from his cartoon-inspired works, to his mask drawings, to his "butterfly" paintings and drawings in which combinations of line and color deliver abstract compositions that register as nonobjective, but which also trigger that part of your brain that begins to recognize depth in a space that seems almost like it's unfolding between a butterfly's opening wings. Add to this dashes of both expressionist heat and some Warholian cool, and you begin to get a sense of Grotjahn's personal code. But what arguably makes these paintings Grotjahn's own is his compelling play of abstract and representational space. I can't help looking at his paintings without thinking of the... More >>>