Bjarne Melgaard

Bjarne Melgaard at Green Naftali thru March 15.

"There’s a lot going on in Bjarne Melgaard’s third solo show in New York: neo-Neo-Expressionist painting and an extended image-text piece; modernist sofas and rustic Norwegian antiques; textile design and automatist drawing; weird sex (on video) and painted references to same; exuberance and tragedy. Above all, there are parody and sincerity so close together as to be indistinguishable.

In the large, colorful paintings, groups of priapic, noseless men are layered with thickly painted images of monsters and phrases like “Gay Mafia,” “Snuff Cube” or “Ben Gazzara.” Some of the monsters seem to be made of dozens of penises (or maybe they’re just cigarettes); the paint handling ranges from black lines that could almost be Warhol silk-screen to Schnabelesque masses of oozing color. If you wonder how they might look over the couch, Mr. Melgaard’s “sculptures” are luxurious sofas by the Viennese designer Josef Hoffmann and chairs by Frederick Kiesler. But they are upholstered with neo-Expressionist textiles of his design; two of the couches come with large mink throws.

The installation piece, “Greenland, a novel,” which has the feeling of a sad, art-house movie, is a fragmented tale of rape and bisexuality scrawled on torn pieces of paper. These — along with snapshots that focus mostly on a blond woman — are taped to a connoisseur-worthy cluster of beautiful Norwegian peasant tables and chairs that also display ceramics, painted boxes, wood coffee pots and carved Inuit figurines. The story is vague but larded with often wrenching physical detail.

Mr. Melgaard’s bad-boy reputation is working overtime in this mélange, celebrating and ridiculing art as painting, as design, as shopping and as life. It’s a big, beautiful, materialistic mess, with the “Greenland” installation providing an undertow of real feeling."

ROBERTA SMITH