Arcadio, O’Connor & Suarez: “The Cheese and the Worms”
- Eye Level
- Sep 16
- 6 min read
As summer turns to autumn, three artists turn and face the strange.
There’s a monster on Sussex Street. It’s a scarecrow, or a statue of one, anyway: big, sinewy, bug-eyed and irate, and almost tall enough to reach the second story of a residential building. This beast rises from the patio of a Paulus Hook brownstone and stares out at the block with a combination of menace and proprietary pride. From now until early November and possibly well beyond that, this will be his neighborhood. He’s an early-blooming example of our favorite harvest species. He’s a Halloween decoration.
Jersey City hits the holiday harder than any other. By October, areas like Paulus Hook will be covered with fake cobwebs, giant homemade spiders, and Instagrammable skeletons clinging to the sides of multimillion-dollar homes. The more historic (and expensive) the neighborhood is, the more likely it is to be invaded by ghouls. Homeowners who spend ten months fretting about curb appeal will spend the other two chasing Grey Gardens. It feels perversely appropriate that this turn toward the macabre and decrepit coincides with the most beautiful time of the year in Jersey City. We’re just playing to Hollywood archetype. Old buildings mean old spirits. No ghost worth its bedsheet would bother haunting a glass-walled condominium.
We want a better fate for them than that. We are fond of our phantasms and want to direct them to zones where they can rattle their chains in comfort and with the support of the community. The Zombie Opera, a combination of classical voice, steampunk, and horror movie schtick, has become an annual tradition in Hamilton Park. In what may prove to be an act of diabolical one-upmanship, Arts 14C is turning their First Street residency into an arts-driven Necropolis. On this spooky territory curator Tina Maneca has opened “The Cheese and the Worms,” a three-artist show that flirts outrageously with the spectral world. It does it so brazenly that it prompts us to ask whether that which spooks us ought to scare us at all.
Maneca has mounted the show at MoRA (80 Grand St.), a gallery and museum in a Paulus Hook mansion a block or so from the leering scarecrow, and named it for Carlo Ginzburg’s 1976 history of Menocchio, an Italian freethinker and amateur scientist burned at the stake in the very late sixteenth century for cosmology in defiance of Church orthodoxy. Menocchio didn’t see himself as demonic, but those in power did. They viewed him as medium for frightening forces, and given the fearsome nature of the physical world, they weren’t exactly wrong. He called his worldview honesty. They treated it like witchcraft.
And witch hunts are hardly a thing of the past. Rooting out the queer and heretical has lately become an obsession among certain humorless authorities. For artists, standing up for the suspected has been a welcome countermove. In “She Is Not a House,” installation artist Christy O’Connor draws from the visual language of horror movies and channels the genteel disquiet of Gothic literature to pledge her allegiance to the strange, the feminine, and the misunderstood. The artist has turned two of the chambers of MoRA into life-sized versions of the rooms in the dollhouse where the weird girl goes.
She’s done it with some ominous, strategically placed canopies, framed pictures of botanicals reminiscent of Edward Gorey illustrations, mannequins decked with old clothing, paper flowers in vases, ornate sconces, curios, a surreal film projected on a sheet next to a tall black and white representations of bare trees, and framed recent photographs of porcelain-masked women that have the feel of heirlooms passed down by generations of oddballs.
O’Connor also uses the printed word. She’s printed up hundreds of slips of paper — note-passing paper suitable for scribbled messages to a crush — typed evocative phrases on them, and hung them from the ceiling in bunches, each one attached to an individual strand of blood red thread. It’s like a beaded curtain hung by a highly literate fortune-teller. This early-autumn flurry of text mediates the viewer’s reaction to the artworks on the wall, registering a protest, scrambling intent, providing accidental captions to the photos, daring the reader to string together sentences. Language is pendulous, elusive and variable, suspended, conditional on where the reader is standing. As a metaphor for the relativity of meaning, it’s a pretty convincing one.
Should we need any more reinforcement (or any more of a chill), O’Connor was ready for us at the opening party. There she sat, white mask and vintage clothing on, glow-box at her navel, hunched over like an apparition in the shadows of the gallery. This was scary, yes, but it was also strangely touching. If a witch or a monster she was for the duration of the show, this was a beast who wore her marks of trauma and difference defiantly. MoRA, a room that whispers of age and gravity and seems a fair harbor for ghosts, gave her an excellent assist.
It also suits Ray Arcadio, a painter whose vision shares more with O’Connor’s than it might first appear. From their top lips down to the bottom of the frame, Arcadio’s portraits are rather conventional — he shows us self-possessed women with temperate expressions in frilly costumes suggestive of European royalty and transcontinental opulence. Their eyes, however, are occluded. Each of his subjects wears an elaborate crown that doubles as a mask. These black face-coverings are so elaborate that the panels can’t contain them. In edges, curves, and swirls, they billow and burst straight out of the tops of the paintings.
Arcadio’s masks allude to African sculpture. But they also recall anime explosions, Brazilian Carnaval headdresses, surreal Jersey street art, smoke, thunderheads in the sky. Pulled down tight over the faces of his characters, they also feel martial. Many look so heavy that it’s miraculous that the subjects can bear up under their weight.
Yet they all carry their ferocious caps as if they’re extensions of their heads. Christy O’Connor’s installation implied witchiness; Arcadio gives us an actual “Bruja” whose black mask has so much mass and frozen motion to it that it flows down her neck and splashes on her shoulders. The headdress of “Bombastic” is as pointed and jagged as a great shuriken (her eyebrows are similarly sharp) and even the “Sweetheart” approaches us with a crown of thorns. Dabblers in the dark arts they may be, but they’ve got our sympathy. We can appreciate their dignity and composure. We begin to understand why they feel the need to shield themselves so fiercely.
If Fabricio Suarez’s spirits aren’t quite as armored, that may be because they’re more conventionally monstrous. His “Swamp Thing,” a meticulously made oil painting in shades of blue-green reminiscent of a night under a low moon, is a blob of vegetable matter fitted with a pair of staring eyeballs. The faces of Arcadio’s sorceresses are split in two by their masks; the “Swamp Thing” is divided by a waterline right in the center of the piece. Its mossy chin is submerged under the surface of the lake, where a serpent, mouth open and ready to strike, curls like the world’s most dangerous necktie. Behind the figure, a tangle of branches and leaning trees filter and strain the narrow night light. Beneath it, the swamp water resolves in a gradient to murky blackness.
As horrifying as that sounds, Suarez’s “Swamp Thing” really isn’t all that scary. The initial impression it makes is an unnerving one, but the more we look into the figure’s eyes, the more benign it seems. Underwater snakes aside, this monster is not here to attack us. It just is.
This feeling is further reinforced by “Self Portrait As One With Nature,” another bust-shaped amalgam of leaves, blossoms, wriggling and flitting insects, gung-ho sprouts. The underbrush of this poor character is burning, and Suarez paints the flames with particular attention as they lick their way from its slumped shoulder to its sheets and ears. It looks alarmed but also resigned to its fate. By no means does it radiate ill will. It is, like Menocchio, simply coping with the difficult exigencies of existence as honestly as it can. To be made of material is macabre, because all material decays. If it’s blasphemous to point that out, then autumn itself is blasphemy.
It helps that Suarez is such a skilled oil painter. In the tradition of surrealists like Kay Sage, his lines are crisp and his color is lush, even when he’s summoning the stuff of fading dreams. We believe that his flowers are carnivorous not merely because he says so — he’s also able to impart to their petals a fleshiness suggestive of the desire to encounter more flesh. They’re sensuous, in other words, and every sensation implies a duration. There’ll be a time, very soon, when the leaves will fall, and the sun will pack its suitcase and retreat from its position in the sky, and the night will seem to last forever. It makes good sense that artists and lawn decorators alike embody that phenomenon through representations of creeping threats and strange creatures. It’s not malevolent. It’s not even too spooky. It’s just September.
(MoRA is open on Thursdays and Fridays from 11 a.m. until 2 p.m., Saturdays from 4 p.m. until 7 p.m., and Sundays from 1 p.m. until 4 p.m., and Mondays through Wednesdays by appointment. I think you should go on Saturday. That way, you can check out the Leandro Comrie show right around the corner at IMUR Gallery. You read it here first: Paulus Hook is getting weirdly cool.)
