Wrestle

Lucky New Yorkers get to see Wrestle, a group exhibition by artists Andrej Dubravsky, Brian Kenny, Frankie Rice, and Elisabeth Smolarz, at Launch F18, beginning Saturday and lasting till the end of October.

Of course, the word "wrestle" is invoked in the title mostly metaphorically: "We may wrestle with the result of a past dilemma, a projected decision, or current situation but the fret (or comfort) of this quandary takes place in the moment, often finding it's not so much the finite content we wrestle with; it's the strategy in how we'll respond to it." (Relax, it's artspeak. It doesn't matter that not a concrete word is to be found here.)

Happily, Brian Kenny's work approaches the theme literally. I have said elsewhere that Kenny is my favorite living artist. That he is a fetching man in real life (sweetly committed to another great artist, photographer Slava Mogutin) is one part of my admiration of him, admittedly.  But most of all, his favored position arrives through his incorporation of wrestling themes in much of his work, primarily etchings and paintings on homoerotic themes.  His well-hung, hairy-legged wrestlers turn me on. ("I don't know anything about art, but I know what I like": to quote Gelett Burgess, artist and art critic, 1866-1951.)

The copper engraving above would look nice in my modest home in Durham, North Carolina. I'm just saying: 81 shopping days left, people.