ART REVIEW : An Eye for Putrescence

Big, vivid and ambitious, Alexis Rockman’s fantastically realistic paintings of the natural world treat the life cycle as if it could be fast-forwarded like a video. At Thomas Solomon’s Garage, the New York-based artist’s seven encyclopedic paintings accelerate the organic cycle of birth, death and decay, speeding viewers through the boring portions of animal existence in order to savor the juicy bits.

In these sumptuously detailed works from the last 1 1/2 years, Rockman specializes in putrescence. A small painting presents a close-up of a festering catfish’s glistening viscera, its flesh eaten away by long-beaked birds. In another picture, vultures gnaw on a dolphin’s beached carcass.

A four-part image offers a tour de force exploration of a teeming drainage ditch, including day and night views, both above and below water, where dozens of creatures feed on each other amid human litter. Other spectacularly crafted paintings allow you to survey garbage-strewn beaches from the point of view of a buzzing fly or circling cicada.

Rockman is at his best when he fuses impossible painterly fantasy with his consummate skills as a scientific illustrator. After all, depicting exactly what a fly or cicada sees would not be as colorful, expansive or detailed as what these paintings invite you to imagine you’d see if your eyes could take the place of an insect’s.

Although death and decay dominate in Rockman’s view of the animal kingdom, not all is a grim struggle to maintain one’s place in the food chain. Illuminated by a traveler’s flashlight, “Kapok Tree” depicts two dozen brightly colored frogs cavorting in a lush rain forest under towering trees and a gorgeous star-filled sky. But danger is never far away in Rockman’s world: A frog-eating bat hovers nearby, alert to the potential feast below.

In spite of Rockman’s obsession with scientific veracity and empirical accuracy, his pictures are most interesting for what they artfully propose about the relationship between beasts and people. Rather than depicting the natural world as it actually is, his paintings give us a particularly New York view of existence: overcrowded, filthy and vicious, where a rambunctious mix of beings adapt to harsh circumstances in the struggle to survive.

* Thomas Solomon’s Garage, 928 N. Fairfax Ave., (213) 654-4731, through July 15. Closed Sundays and Mondays.