Is there anything more ubiquitous in art than portraits? Nonetheless, they continue to fascinate us in the same way as biographies. When successful, they give us insight into the psyches of strangers, adding to our knowledge of our fellow human beings and ourselves. In this group show of nine artists, we meet enough characters to populate several books, each of them intriguing in a different way.
Jason Robert Bell’s tortured and hypnotic “Metaphysical Portraits,” named Captain Lumaria, Chrislegula, Jatzostien and Rax, could be characters out of Dostoevsky or Kafka, with their contorted features and agonized expressions, while Jenny Morgan’s women share a refreshing innocence, each of them using their gloved or painted hands to alter, disguise or reassure themselves. Most touchingly, the woman in “From the Valley to the Stars” holds her fingers in front of her bare breasts, a quizzical look on her face. She disarms with her directness.
“Portrait of Gabe Falsetta,” by Yevgeniy Fiks.
On the other hand, Alexa Mead, in a series of dramatic, richly colored self-portraits, offers us moods, her face a powerfully wrought landscape of emotion. But she does just as well with others, her “Timmy on the Metro” particularly captivating because of her sensitive way of conveying the nuances of city life. Yevgeniy Fiks took as his subject members of the American Communist Party, people that influenced his life. Having grown up in the Soviet Union in the 1980s, he attempts to make sense of the propaganda and the reality through his art. All unsmiling, his portraits could be depicting members of any party and appear to have nothing in common but their politics. “Portrait of Gabe Falsetta” shows a rather gaunt middle-aged man, with a touch of sadness in his gaze, an expression he shares with Esther Morose. Ursula Endlicher makes fun of Facebook in a video installation that reenacts scenes from its pages. Not a bad idea but it is without the resonance of so many of the other works in the show, like Chris Verene’s beautifully composed chromogenic print “Amber’s First Two Kids, Mercedes and Jayden-Lexus,” where two young girls sprawl on a living room floor all innocence and unselfconsciousness. There are faces here that will be impossible to forget.
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Through May 8. Postmasters Gallery, 459 W. 19th St., 212-727-3323.
