An installation view of Jim Chatelain: Correcting Past Mistakes,  will be up at the Oakland University Art Gallery through November 24, 2024 (Photos courtesy of OUAG, except where noted.)

Continuing its tradition of outstanding exhibitions, the Oakland University Art Gallery presents Jim Chatelain: Correcting Past Mistakes, up through November 24. The 40 works on display, created between 2001 and 2024, represent an eruption of color and tangled abstraction, in some cases intriguingly intestinal in appearance. Altogether, the show opens a fascinating window on the non-figurative work of the celebrated Cass Corridor artist, now in his mid-70s, who’s still producing at an impressive clip.

Many people may be familiar with Chatelain’s earliest paintings that caused a sensation in the much-talked-about 1978 “Bad” Painting show at Manhattan’s New Museum — crudely outlined urban figures of the sort you might have seen on Cass Avenue in those years, rendered with seemingly slapdash brushstrokes and an air of menace. Subsequent figurative work involved a weirdly magnificent series of facial portraits, full of distorted and bulbous features, that – never mind their odd appearance – manage to be both poignant and disturbing in equal measure.

In a biographical essay for the Paul Kotula Projects gallery in Ferndale, Robert Storr – who long headed the Museum of Modern Art’s department of painting and sculpture – urged art enthusiasts to “take a walk on the wild side with [Chatelain] as your guide. You’ll meet a cast of hard-bitten urban types, [with] extraordinary toughness whose heavily lined faces bear the unmistakable trace of what it takes to just keep going in the late modern purgatory that is big city life in our time. Chatelain knows these people inside and out; he’s their recording angel.”

Jim Chatelain, Untitled, Acrylic paint, paint pen 0n linen paper, 24 x 20 inches, 2023.

Compared with those gritty predecessors, one of the delights of Correcting Past Mistakes is just how beautiful these twisted abstracts, often suggesting collapse and calamity, really are. Curator Ryan Standfest, an artist who teaches at Oakland and has long been a Chatelain admirer, describes the works as “frenzied and active” with an “aura of tumult.” Yet these are meticulously crafted works, never mind their vaguely cartoon-like appearance. “The paintings are vibrant, with colors that pop,” Standfest says. “One color doesn’t cancel out the other – they support each other quite well.” This echoes the artist’s own appraisal. In an interview with Standfest in the show’s handsome catalog, Chatelain describes his choice in colors as “really pop-y. My palette is really like that. It’s the blue of the Superman costume and the red of the cape.”

Chatelain, who maintains a studio in Ferndale as well as one in Delhi, New York, about 120 miles from Manhattan, hails from Findlay, Ohio. In 1967, he transferred from Findlay College to  Wayne State University, sight unseen, graduating with a BFA in 1971. While at Wayne, he studied painting with John Egner, a professor who was a co-founder of the legendary Willis Gallery and a key mentor to much of the early Cass Corridor talent. Their collective work finally got the official stamp of approval in 1980 when the Detroit Institute of Arts pulled together the seminal show Kick Out the Jams: Detroit’s Cass Corridor 1963-1977.

Jim Chatelain, Basket, Acrylic paint pen with vinyl paint on paper and mat board, 21 ½ x 17 inches, 2024.

The recent abstracts on display at OUAG are remarkably immersive and seductive. Go ahead — just try to resist their labyrinthine magnetism. In her catalog essay, critic Lynn Crawford describes the works as “unfamiliar, uncanny, yet bursting with life.” And indeed, it’s hard not to get sucked into their twisted contours, where something – digestion, perhaps? – is clearly going on. For her part, Crawford refers to “blended strands of lifeforms” that “radiate an energy and are possibly equipped to take on initiatives themselves.”

Yet there’s also a series of constructions that employ Phillips-head screws as their chief element and mostly rely on a muted palette that stands in sharp contrast to the boldly colored works that constitute the majority of the show. One can’t help but be struck by the exertion that went into these pieces, and they manifest an air of struggle and threat that sets them apart, echoing some of the ominousness in Chatelain’s early figurative work.

Even the title of one, Head on a Plate, implies danger. Standfest laughs when asked about these works. “There are an insane number of screws on them,” he says. “Talk about violence! Just imagine Jim screwing each one of those in, over and over.” He adds, “I’ve never asked him if he had a strategy, whether he marked off where they would go or just made it up as he went along.”

Jim Chatelain, Head on a Plate, Enamel paint, screws on plywood, 48 x 32 inches, 2001.

Jim Chatelain, Head on a Plate (detail), Enamel paint, screws on plywood, 48 x 32 inches, 2001. (Photo: Detroit Art Review)

Yet the title above also points to another key element of Chatelain’s oeuvre, a dark humor that ripples through many works. Standfest argues there’s “something of a violent physical comedy to Jim’s work that links to the [earlier] figures in some ways. He describes the figurative work as ‘situations,’ and there’s a tension in that.” Chatelain himself acknowledges a certain puckishness to much of what he’s produced. “In those early 70s figure paintings, there’s humor in those. They’re cartoonish in some ways,” he says. “It’s a little harder to do with the abstract work, but I think it can be done, [though] I can’t say that’s the case with all of it or most of it.” Chatelain sums it all up in a refreshing artistic philosophy: “It’s a failed painting that doesn’t have a little humor coming out of it.”

Jim Chatelain, The Caged Flea, Acrylic on canvas, 72 x 96 inches, 2015.

The gallery will host three talks open to the public before the show closes. On September 26, curator Ryan Standfest will lead a walkthrough of the show. On October 30, Dan Nadel, who’s curating an alternate history of American art in the 1960s for New York’s Whitney Museum, will speak. On November 6, Standfest will interview Chatelain. All gallery talks take place at noon.

Jim Chatelain: Correcting Past Mistakes will be up at the Oakland University Art Gallery in Rochester through November 24, 2024.

An installation view of Look At Me! Look A Me Now! Exhibition at West Bloomfield’s Art Leaders Gallery, up through March 30.

In a treat for anyone who loves cartoons, The Imaginative, Profound & Magical World of Dr. Seuss: The Rare Editions Exhibition will be up at Art Leaders Gallery in West Bloomfield through March 30, 2024. On Saturday, March 23, the gallery will host a special open house for the Seuss exhibit from 3 to 6 p.m.

This show of prints and sculptures, which you’ll find at the center of the Art Leaders space, is surprisingly magnetic. On display are a number of treasures that will appeal to fans, including several “before and after” pairings, where the original rough draft – with multiple, seemingly messy lines working out each visual element – is framed in a diptych with the polished, final version. It makes for fun viewing and gives a little glimpse into the process that produces what looks like simple art.

Consider the two versions of Look at Me Now, starring Seuss’ best-known creation, the Cat in the Hat, who’s juggling all manner of breakable items while balancing on a ball. It’s classic Seussian absurdity, and an almost universally recognizable childhood image.

Dr. Seuss, Look At Me Now!, Look At Me Now!,  Diptych, 26.5 by 17.5 inches. (Photos courtesy of Art Leaders Gallery.)

Dr. Seuss published his first children’s book, “And to Think I Saw That on Mulberry Street,” in 1937. But it was “The Cat in the Hat” exactly 20 years later that really catapulted the artist into the pop-cult stratosphere. It was fame that never flagged. His death in 1991 at 87 prompted all sorts of elegiac summaries: In its front-page obituary, the New York Times called Seuss “the modern Mother Goose,” while Time Magazine declared he was “one of the last doctors to make house calls – some 200 million of them in 20 languages.”

(“The Cat in the Hat,” by the way, was significant not just for its unhinged hero — who generated childish excitement and anxiety in equal measure — but also because it employed a limited vocabulary of about 220 “beginner’s words” recommended by reading specialists. Seuss then wrote it all up in a cadence — “anapestic tetrameter,” if you must — that was particularly easy for young readers to master and learn. From there on in, his books aimed to make learning how to read fun – quite a shift from the old “Dick and Jane” primers of the time.)

One of the charms of Seuss’ work, of course, has always been its complete lack of pretension and his willingness to make fun of himself. Four months after the launch of “Cat in the Hat,” the Saturday Evening Post helped the artist do just that when it ran what would become the most-iconic Seuss self-portrait, The Cat Behind the Hat – featuring the good doctor as his famous feline, looking dyspeptic, complete with stovepipe hat – in its July 6, 1957 issue.

Dr. Seuss, The Cat Behind the Hat, 20 by 10 inches.

Theodor Seuss Geisel – aka Dr. Seuss – initially got his start in advertising. Two years out of Dartmouth College in 1927, the young Geisel, from Springfield, Massachusetts, got a job drawing ads for “The Flit” — a household insecticide spray Standard Oil of New Jersey produced which promised to kill almost anything that crept, fluttered or crawled. Charmingly, the style of one ad from the early forties is unmistakably Seuss-ian, with an impish bug in a red-striped shirt who’s just flown right through a woman’s fancy hat, sparking predictable outrage.

Once Seuss was working full-time on children’s literature – his output was staggering – he took to working on his own personal art at night and on weekends, much of which is in the Art Leaders exhibition. Some, like the luridly colored Worm Glowing Bright in the Forest in the Night, approach abstract expressionism, albeit with the puckish intrusion of a befuddled yellow worm. Others, like Life’s a Great Balancing Act, play with patterns in a way that’s slightly reminiscent of Escher, but always, again, with a dash of oddball humor.

Dr. Seuss, Life’s a Great Balancing Act, 30.75 by 22 inches.

A man of his times, Seuss has, perhaps inevitably, come under fire for depictions of minorities that now seem tone-deaf and condescending. The Amazing World of Dr. Seuss Museum in Springfield, Massachusetts, announced in 2017 that it would replace a mural that included such images. And in 2021, the Seuss estate said it would voluntarily stop selling six titles, including Mulberry Street, thought to contain egregious examples of racial and ethnic stereotypes.

Happily, the art in this spirited exhibition avoids those sorts of dated allusions. Most just underlines Dr. Seuss’ gift for enchanting idiocy, and his ability to spin magical, gossamer worlds out of thin air. His approach is almost unfailingly gentle, indulgent, and tolerant of the frailties of this brittle world. In Seuss-land, all human rancor can be boiled down to the contentious standoff between two neighbors featured in My Petunia Can Lick Your Geranium, competing over who had the better garden.

Dr. Seuss, My Petunia Can Lick Your Geranium, 27 by 34 inches.

 The publisher of The Art of Dr. Seuss, Robert M. Chase, notes that almost everyone has a “significant Dr. Seuss memory” and that any number of creative artists and writers acknowledge the master’s influence on their work. “Indeed,” writes Chase on the website of the same name, “what Walt Disney was to entertainment, Theodor Seuss Geisel was to art and literature.”

Dr. Seuss, Cat from the Wrong Side of the Tracks, 22 by 44 inches.

The Imaginative, Profound & Magical World of Dr. Seuss: Look At Me! Look At Me Now! The Rare Editions Exhibition will be at West Bloomfield’s Art Leaders Gallery through March 30, 2024.