NEW YORK TIMES, December 21, 2001~Ken Johnson

STEVE GIANAKOS
Fredericks Freiser Gallery

Steve Gianakos, one of the more interesting professional eccentrics to troll the margins of the mainstream, combines wacky pop-style comedy and erotically transgressive surrealism. In the more recent efforts in this selection of works from the last three decades, Mr. Gianakos focuses on female figures cobbled together like surrealist exquisite corpses, from down-market cartoons.

He subjects his found images to photomechanical processes, producing blotchy linear pictures on glued-together sheets of paper. With areas of brushy white and off-white paint, the tabloid-size collages have an old, distressed look, as though they had been exhumed from some moldy basement of the mind.

The female subjects have animal heads, faces floating in soup bowls and breasts, buttocks and legs from different sources, disjunctively joined. One is being gynecologically probed by an octopus; another in sexy lingerie has crawled under the Victorian desk of a gourd-headed businessman. Though assembled from fetishized parts, the women in these pictures are less objects of desire than of anxiety; they might be personifications of the artist’s own creatively disturbing unconscious.

Coming out of the familiar surrealist tradition, Mr. Gianakos’ women are not completely surprising. Some of the show’s least predictable pictures are not about sex. One small canvas from 1982, for example, depicts in white on black three boys laughing at a big jug-eared fellow; its title, “Village Idiot” refers to a role that certain cannily perverse contemporary artists like to play.