Dennis Kardon is the legitimate heir of all the renegade traditions of modern painting, from the bastardized pittura metafisica of late de Chirico through Picabia at his most transgressive to the “classic” “Bad” painters of the 1980s. The Midas of perversity, whatever his brush touches turns to ickiness. The ambivalent orb in the forefront of “Anticipating Disaster” redefines the notion of the “anxious object”: a globe that somehow sprouts vaginal wings out of its melting icecap. Elsewhere in this decomposing composition is a shape wrapped in a crinkly silver foil that hints at a joint of meat you don’t want to unwrap. The chance encounter of this unhappy couple takes place within a still life setting that could read equally as a tabletop or an eerie architectural space of indefinable scale. Kardon is a master of ill ease.
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