New York based artist Erik Parker is well known for his brightly colored, intensely layered paintings that employ an “organized chaos”. His style is a culmination of many styles, somewhere between the grotesque portraits of Francis Bacon and the imaginative arrangements of Giuseppe Arcimboldo, from graffiti to psychedelic album covers and cartoons. Parker once said that his aim is to “test how far he can go in the 21st century in taking the figure to the extremes of alteration,” and whether it be a figure or our television set, his extreme palette makes them look completely alien. Though many have labeled Parker’s works as mad or psychedelic, he spends a significant amount of time planning his dizzying compositions. Throughout his career, he has depicted recurring images of maps, heads, landscapes, hieroglyphics and elements of American subculture, which he presents in the context of modern day issues. For his current solo exhibition at Paul Kasmin Gallery in New York, showing alongside Mark Ryden’s “Dodecahedron” (covered here), he reuses these motifs in new shaped canvases. Titled “Undertow”, some works offer a binocular-shaped perspective of his Pop-colored world, others, in the formation of pyramids. He likens his visuals to scrolling through the loud and inescapable “pictoral chatter” of social media, where he makes references to media, popular culture, music, and art history. Erik Parker’s “Undertow” is now on view at Paul Kasmin Gallery through January 23rd, 2016.
“Undertow”:
Additional works:
This issue's features include: the poetic figurative paintings of Lukifer Aurelius, the glitchy narrative mayhem of Ori Toor, The bold graphic paintings of Hilda Palafox, the ornate sculptures of Beth Katleman, the outrageous paintings of cover feature Erik Parker, the intricate drawings of Ben Tolman, art history and the reluctant realism of F. Scott Hess, and the new sculptures and paintings by Amy Sol, as well as a special report on the hand painted (and uber violent) movie posters of Ghana. Plus: a Special 16-page insert section dedicated to previewing the Hi-Fructose Presents: the Art of the Mushroom show and more. 
When painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo portrayed figures made out of every objects, fruits, and vegetables, he presented the idea of life as living riddle or jigsaw puzzle. Living and working in Warsaw, Poland, 