Damian Loeb

Mary Boone, through February 12 (see 57th Street).

Damian Loeb's latest paintings take the idea of borrowing from pop culture to a new level of artistic indifference. The results resemble the orphaned love children of '70s-style Photorealism.

Loeb's work features mainly young Asian women-who, I suspect began as images in softcore mags and B movies. Even when Loeb bothers to dress them, they fail to rise above the level of Suzie Wong Hollywood cliche. Although Loeb ministers to the male gaze, his subjects have all the heat of wax-museum effigies.

In School Closed, a sweet young thing does a leg split on the playground, behind some fencing. She's sexy, but so bereft of emotion, you wish, for once, that school was open. Deep South is the name on a neon sign for a motel right out of Psycho. A woman in a slinky, red-silk mandarin dress stands by a car in the parking lot, her head haloed by another icon of male fantasy, the TV satellite dish. ln Fish Sticks, a rather depressed-looking guy searches for a box of Mrs. Paul's in the fridge (psst, they're in the side door) while a completely naked babe with neatly trimmed pubic hair stands behind him impatiently tapping her toe. Loeb has lovingly rendered the space between her legs, but she has an unnaturally boneless quality.

In all his paintings, Loeb, God love him, strives like an indie auteur for deep meaning; but his superficial painting style and his wholly derivative imagination leave the viewer little to savor besides stale afterimages of mass media.

— Robert Mahoney