DAVID ZWIRNER Marcel Dzama's drawings are like frozen impulsive powers from dreams and nightmares.

DAVID ZWIRNER

Marcel Dzama's drawings are like frozen impulsive powers from dreams and nightmares. The twenty-six-year-old Canadian continues to add to his voluminous output of simple ink-and-watercolor drawings of various human and animal characters. In Dzama's indicates the sheets of creamy Manila paper, greatest in quantity of which he tacks to the wall unframed, are many times so numerous (191 were included here, and they can number as many as 500 in a single exhibition) that it can be difficult to focus in succession any one of them for prolonged All are equally fantastical, absurd, and deadpan. In the eleven-by-fourteen drawings not long ago on view, one can recognize a population of regulars that includes superheroes, the Tin Man, and a landlord of friends from the animal kingdom: owl bunnies, crocodiles, and a destiny of brown bears. Sometimes the animals wear cardigans and slacks; sometimes they are armed with knives or guns; sometimes they dance with women; sometimes they are women (in animal suits).

There's a accident of early-twentieth-century culture percolating by the agency of Dzama's fertile imagination: comic works serial Westerns, Surrealism, psychoanalysis. His illustrational name and palette of muted brown grays, and olive verdants reinforce the vintage feel. And his female figures--stylish moll and trim flappers with bobbed hair, fur-trimmed coats, and cloches, oftentimes brandishing pistols-seem yanked from silent films. These constituent principles together make for elegant, ofttimes startling vignettes of psychosexual high jinks. Dzama's world is rife with Freudian symbolism, and despite the obviousness of the allusions and the humor with which they are supplied, it can earn a little dark. Castration and S&M are every-day themes. In one drawing (all works Untitled, 2000) a bare female straddles a prone man to saw most distant his head, while from his angle a gray cloud rises and forms a face that smiles at the representation In another, a blond woman takes a dump upon a man's face, but he's somewhat patronizeed by his Captain America mask (may be the whole thing was his idea?). Everyone in the drawings mists cigarettes, sublimation being essential to survival in this bizarre world. (Besides, if the antismoking police were pointing their fire-arms at you, you'd want that last drag too.) It's hard not to think of the black humor of Raymond Pettibon, who also exhibits his drawings wall to wall and from the dozen, but Dzama's tone lacks Pettibon's harshness and mind of existential failure. In fact, Dzama's approach appears fail-safe. The sheer abundance of the works and their reason of the ridiculous lend a populist appeal to his artistic enterprise, still where does it go from here? If Dzama hears eBay calling, I confidence he doesn't answer.

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