| The representation of drawing within the scope of fine art is still a marginalized genre that appears most prominently in street art and comics. Loaded at the Phatory gallery of the East Village offered me the chance to present a small selection of drawings and paintings by Saul Chernick and Ernest Concepcion. Drawing upon vernacular imagery, both artists featured a crossover of two different drawing techniques that conveyed how the process of drawing is utilized as a fluid medium. When I met Chernick several years ago, he was embarking on an exploration of the arabesque and its ability to render contorted, figural forms. Inspired largely by his Jewish lineage, Chernick sought to transform the personal into a visual experience that resonated into something larger. | 
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Jill Conner
Loaded was on display at the Phatory in August.
Courtesy of the artist.The representation of drawing within the scope of fine art is still a marginalized genre that appears most prominently in street art and comics. Loaded at the Phatory gallery of the East Village offered me the chance to present a small selection of drawings and paintings by Saul Chernick and Ernest Concepcion. Drawing upon vernacular imagery, both artists featured a crossover of two different drawing techniques that conveyed how the process of drawing is utilized as a fluid medium.
When I met Chernick several years ago, he was embarking on an exploration of the arabesque and its ability to render contorted, figural forms. Inspired largely by his Jewish lineage, Chernick sought to transform the personal into a visual experience that resonated into something larger. When he turned to the two-tone drawing process, the artist carried on with various interpretations of the arabesque but also reached back to traditional Western imagery made by artists such as Albrecht Dürer and Lucas Cranach. However, instead of elaborating further about the symbols of virtue and vice, Chernick used his sleight of hand to reveal suppressed sensual desires within an eloquent combination of visual cues. A Late Smoke (2008), for instance, portrays a Moses-like figure holding a small cigarette while puffing a voluminous cloud that depicts a candle. Whether they serve as dreams or memories, Chernick’s elaborate depictions echo the non-linear nature of events that appear in underground comics.
Concepcion, on the other hand, works in color and begins by painting idyllic landscapes that look out far and wide into a new world. After a period of one to three months, the artist returns to these empty landscapes and aggressively tags each surface with sharpie pens. Minuscule figures fight against space hybrids, trapped in a collection of never-ending horrific battles. Concepcion’s use of landscape, as an overall context, serves as a framework for his long-running inner narrative, populated with science fiction, beasts, and war. He also conveyed his own experience as a Filipino citizen who has grown up with the realization that everything in the world is at conflict with itself. The four paintings in this show, such as Ode to Odin (2006), capture the impossible within a photorealistic setting, suggesting the potential for mass destruction.
While retracing the development of continued linear movement, both artists transform banal, everyday imagery into abundantly complex fantasies. This exhibition explored “caricatura,” also known as the loaded and exaggerated image, in order to reveal the pictorial tensions that arise in sequential art as the drawn line evolves gradually from one subject into another.
