Oscar de Las Flores, “A Brief History of the Western World, Chapter 2”

Tragic Portrait of the Artistic Talent of Mr. Oscar Camilo de Las Flores,Dead in the Flower of it’s Infancy

Photograph: Courtesy Morgan Lehman

Horror vacui only begins to describe the pen-and-ink drawings in Oscar de Las Flores’s new exhibition. Indeed, he has filled nearly every speck of pictorial real estate in these works with creepy, densely packed figures.

In a grotesque self-portrait, The Classical Artist Oscar de Las Flores Exceeds Himself at Pleasing His Audience of Critics, Collectors, Connoisseurs and Other Art Speculators, the artist is seen at work in his studio while simultaneously screwing a rather rubbery-looking blonde, doggy-style. Louis XIV, Saint Jerome, Nero, several prelates, a donkey-headed man in a bow tie and other characters look on as a baby with a Coke can drools over the easel.

Into the World Came a Beautiful Soul, Named Kissinger shows the former Secretary of State on the half shell, naked as Botticelli’s Venus. The damned burn in the flames of hell underneath him while an ayatollah, a pirate, a cyclops, a minotaur, a pig-faced military dictator and Donald Duck writhe in a mass that threatens to spill off of the paper.

This particular title is adapted from a painting by Ivan Albright, and while de Las Flores owes a debt to Albright’s jittery visions of hallucinatory decrepitude, he seems equally inspired by Goya and Diego Rivera. And though the artist clearly intends some sort of satire in these works, the excess of detail, fortunately, overwhelms the content’s tendentiousness. This is political cartooning as acid trip, social protest as fever dream.

—Joseph R. Wolin