Andre Butzer at Metro Pictures

For ‘Time Out New York’ Magazine

On a recent weekday, the traffic at Andre Butzer’s first New York solo show flowed in and quickly back out as skeptical visitors encountered the young German painter’s garish, Expressionist renderings of cartoony characters.  Butzer’s brightly colored, monumental canvases are an amusing finger in the eye of prevailing taste – the ‘lessness’ exemplified in the Whitney Biennial – but their role as harbinger of a sea-change in art world fashion is greater than their value as art.
 
In the first gallery, four huge portraits of Euro-American pop-culture hybrids sport Mickey Mouse gloves and faces resembling cartoons, SS death heads and Munch’s screamer, though none are particularly amusing or menacing.  Phallic projections in place of arms recall Caroll Dunham’s grotesque, penis-nosed characters but without the mystery, while the figures suggest the kitschy colors of Kenny Scharf but not his surreal creativity.
 
Among his own generation of painters, Butzer evinces stylistic similarities to Jonathan Meese’s colorful impasto canvases and Bjarne Melgaard’s messily rendered quasi-humans.  But while their free manner with paint is accompanied by developed, albeit personal storylines; Butzer’s deadpan, recurring characters dangle the potential for narrative in front of their audience without really delivering. 
 
The worst culprit is ‘Viele Tote in Heimatland:  Fanta, Sprite, H-Milch, Mickey and Donald!’ a nearly thirty foot long canvas arranged with spectral heads surrounded by thin layers of splashed and slapped on paint.  Despite the title’s suggestion of a German-American cultural mash-up, Butzer’s ambition to cover that much yardage trumps his ability to come up with appropriately tour de force subject matter, making for a disappointingly flashy debut without much substance.