DISTORT: “Ending Up”
- Eye Level
- May 6
- 7 min read
New oil paintings of the turbulent city from one of the town's exemplary muralists.
Just before you reach the entrance to the Journal Square station, you’ll see the train before the train. It’s a mural on the south side of an old apartment building on Summit Avenue. Its creator has, through a trick of perspective, made it look like a PATH tunnel has been cut out of the brick. A rail car in aerosol rushes toward us. Behind it are representations of the rock from which the tunnel was hewn, laborers with pickaxes, and a godlike figure whose garment seems to contain the primordial Jersey forest. At the bottom of the image is a modest tag: DISTORT. The artist has worked around architectural features, several metal poles and fixtures, and the rather undramatic proximity of a Dunkin Donuts to bring us this vision — one that neither glorifies or minimizes public works, but instead reminds us of their utility, their place in local history, and the sweat of those workers who sutured together the town.
Jersey City has produced a few exemplary muralists. Some are aerosol wizards; some are excellent portraitists; some are just good at going big and bold and bossy. Yet none gets closer to the narrative intensity of the Mexican masters Diego Garcia and David Alfaro Siqueiros than DISTORT does. His pieces are political without being didactic — they’re visual interventions in histories both local and national, and frank interrogations of the forces that have created the city we’re in. They ask: where do we think we’re going?
The allegorical depth of DISTORT’s work means that he doesn’t need to rely on scale to get over. In “Reaching for the Steal,” a strong 2020 show at Deep Space (77 Cornelison St.), he brought his vision indoors with a series of paintings that examined the explosive substances that have put a chemical charge in the American experiment: guns, sex, the police, industry, the coercive force of the state. “Ending Up,” a follow-up that arrives four and a half years later, isn’t quite so graphic. Yet the show, which’ll hang at the Art House Productions gallery (345 Marin Blvd.) until the first of June, is heavy with the uncertainty and bewilderment of our country’s (and our planet’s) recent history. It’s a more accomplished exhibition than its predecessor, more colorful, more gripping, sadder and weightier, full of pieces that are easily the equal of the murals that have made his name and his tag locally famous. If DISTORT’s voice has ever reached to you on the street, it will definitely speak to you indoors.
The artist makes the room crackle with his own peculiar energy. The five new paintings that Art House Productions curator Andrea McKenna has coaxed out of DISTORT aren’t building-sized, but they’re plenty big by the standard of modern galleries. Though they’re rendered in oil, his canvases lean toward the cotton-soft contours of aerosol. DISTORT’s lines are usually well-defined, but there’s a misty, milky quality to his skies, his canopies of trees, and his city streets. Then there are the characteristic DISTORT colors: bold, electric shades that Jersey City pedestrians know well. He loves to juxtapose sunset violet with ember orange and the green of budding plants in the spring. It’s all deliberately transportive — images of a city we feel like we know, but also one that’s been strategically defamiliarized to call our attention to its strange majesty and its troublesome fault lines.
In “The Decision,” a woman sits on a stone stairway that ascends toward the top of a tree-covered cliff. We don’t see the terminus of the path, but there’s a feeling that it’s very far away, and that any climber on this ledge has a long way to go before she reaches a clearing. Beneath her sneakered feet, a chasm opens, and in that chasm are scores of skyscrapers in the midcentury architectural style. This is an East Coast commercial district we’re looking at from above: a maze of corners, angles, pinnacles, signs of white-collar industrial activity everywhere, but no actual humans visible. In the forest, day is dawning; in the city, it’s definitely night.
The subject of the painting rests her chin in the palm of her left hand. There’s no urgency in her meditative expression, but we’re still invited to wonder whether she’ll keep journeying into the woods or if she’ll descend back down to the built environment. From the fingers of her right hand, a cigarette dangles. Its lit end is a fierce DISTORT orange. It’s merely a speck on a large and colorful canvas, but it commands attention and carries apocalyptic significance. Will a flick of ash fall from its burning tip to the ground below and start a blaze? Or is already so fissile down there that one more spark isn’t going to make a difference?
DISTORT’s city in a chasm is imposing, and maybe intimidating, too. But this is not a vision of hell. It’s a handsome, impressive city he’s showing us, functional, impersonal, full of rows of lights in high offices and a rising, enveloping mist. In “Ending Up,” the gorgeous, dynamic canvas that gives this show its name, the artist lowers himself into a similar crevasse, this one hotter, brighter, and tighter. He does not look down at the street below, but instead aims his aerosol can at the cliff face. The vermillion shade of the town is reflected in his face, but in his rounded posture and his visible humility, he also seems to belong to the natural world above him. The human being in “Mad Decent” hangs by one hand from a rope suspended far above the glowing city. He could be climbing a building, or trying to escape.
There are two ways to look at these dramatic juxtapositions between the town and the garden. One view is that these are pictures of nature reclaiming what we’ve taken from it. The cities and the inequities they represent are, as Joni Mitchell once called them, electric scabs — cuts we’ve dug into the surface of the planet, temporary, shallow, and regrettable. A new post-urban world can be built from the wreckage of the old if we’re willing to put in the labor and continue our climb up the mountain toward a new and bucolic Eden.
This may be exactly what DISTORT, who has never been shy about his utopian streak, means to tell us. Yet I tend toward a different interpretation of these paintings. I don’t think that the artist is showing us what could be. I think he’s showing us what is. These new works are doing that the way that murals do: through vibrant, muscular demonstrations of the expressive power of color and shape. The fierce, inorganic hues of the cities are by no means confined to the cracks in the forest floor. Instead we see them in the treetops, on the rims of rock walls, and, most importantly, in the details the painter has assigned to the people he’s showing us. (That includes the glowing orange button on the right pocket of the subject of “Cake Mix,” a soulful portrait of a city dweller girded against the winter and the bright pink urban sky.) The effects of urbanization have escaped the cracks in the earth. It’s not a disaster. It’s not exactly natural. Nevertheless, it’s recognizable, and maybe even beautiful.
The “Decision” that we face, as it turns out, is not a binary one. “Ending Up” shows us urban and untamed states of being that are thoroughly entangled. Whether we ascend the rock escarpment or descend into the alleyways, we find the same energy: trees and skyscrapers, pushing, aspirationally, toward a distant sky. DISTORT encourages us to work with the exigencies of the difficult city we’ve got, and challenges us, as an act of radical love, to improvise our way to a new way of being.
And isn’t this exactly what good muralists do?, they ascend to the tops of buildings and refashion them with colors and shapes that make them salient to the experiences of new generations. They don’t knock the structure down; they don’t reject the city at all. They work with what they’re given. If they dare, if they’re willing to take a risk and get into the crack, the old world can become a new canvas. The precarity captured in “Ending Up” — the sense of dangling verticality that we feel throughout this show — is residue of DISTORT’s experiences. He’s logged time on the cliff-faces of tenement walls. He’s tried to figure out what these buildings have to say to us, he’s read the clues, and he’s translated the language of their architecture into a fresh idiom.
Given the artist’s adventures in the post-industrial margins of the city, maybe the pieces in “Ending Up” aren’t as metaphorical as they initially appear to be. There are plenty of places in Jersey City where buildings abut cliffs covered with vegetation. These also happen to be areas favored by graffiti artists. “Nativity Scene,” a canvas that alludes to Renaissance paintings of the Virgin and her attendant angels, is set in a reed-choked, verdant gulley with concrete structures that resemble those in the Bergen Arches. The steps to heaven — or someplace like it — in “The Decision” are similar to many pathways that allow a pedestrian to reach the top of the Palisade from the Downtown or nearby. Those stone staircases take the navigator through steep territory dominated by vegetation. It may feel like she’s escaping into another world. But when she gets to the top, well, she’s probably in Union City.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the most eye-catching element of the show — a sculptural-architectural element that, while not as deep as the paintings, certainly commands attention. DISTORT has warped the corners of the gallery: he’s made it look like the drywall and the bricks behind it are melting, and buckling, and dripping material toward the Art House floor. It’s as if he has cooked the entire building in a microwave. From the midst of the liquefying masonry, arms reach out toward the middle of the room. As a metaphor for the decay of structures and institutions, it’s hard to miss. You may be amazed by the way in which the bricks are twisting and bending under the unbearable pressure of modern life. You may be even more impressed by the way the bricks are, somehow, holding together.
(The Art House Productions gallery is open from 1 p.m. until 4 p.m. on Saturdays and Sundays. DISTORT will give an artist talk on Sunday, May 18.)
