Orlando’s City Hall looms over its plaza like the radiator grill of a postwar Packard. Inside, the Terrace Gallery’s solo exhibition by the Orlando-based artist Kyle (mononymed, like Michelangelo or Cher) hits you with Packard-era imagery and icons.
I first met Kyle early in his career, after he adopted a single-name moniker referencing comic book heroes. Since then, he has developed his fictional persona and exhibited far and wide, so the Terrace Gallery is a homecoming show for him.
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Much of Kyle’s time lately is spent wrecking and reconstructing midcentury pop art, comic book imagery, Americana model kits, and nostalgic ideas about color, sex and gender roles. This show is mostly new work, evolving from earlier paintings and shadow boxes. Kyle depicts a world in a river of trouble, about to drown.
We caught up with the artist while he was still hanging the show. “Yeah,” he reflected, considering the show’s title — A One Act Play, As It Really Happened — bestowed by city of Orlando curator Pat Greene. “Ideas come faster than I can paint them. I use a lot of pulp and vintage material. So these are scenes in a personal narrative which I try to capture.”
Kyle’s paintings revel in comic book panels à la Roy Lichtenstein, but unlike the pop icon’s crispness, Kyle goes for messiness: “I love how these pre-digital printed colors bleed over the lines, sometimes blur, and have delicious areas of confusion or contradiction.”
And that’s his departure point into a quest that begins, near the gallery’s entrance, with an ominous abandoned station wagon in the woods. Below it a woman utters a warning, confusing the viewer from the start.
Something’s wrong in this gallery.
Sex stereotypes in Kyle’s work are usually reversed: 1950s-era rocketship models with female astronauts? Women artists dancing in their studio, underneath hapless men milling about a toppled farm tower? One scene after another pokes at the classic ’50s white-male-breadwinner, white-girl-on-pedestal, and reverses these roles.
This reversal echoes through everything in this tight body of work. Kyle acknowledged it.
“I like it when gravity isn’t working,” he commented, as we looked at a series of classic comic-book men free-floating inside thickly painted earth tones. Troubling abstract whirls of color and form invade photorealistic paintings. Trees are upside down. Battleships are turned on end.
“What if a Transformer robot,” he mused, “could turn itself into … a vacuum cleaner?”
As one progresses through the gallery, blue- and yellow-toned midcentury women get stronger and achieve agency: They throw men down, kiss them, slap them and express pain and fear. In the meantime, Kyle defocuses the white men. “I blur them or just white them out. They’re ciphers. In these scenes, the women are in charge.”
The show has a narrative climax with several very large paintings that Kyle completed recently. These are epic disasters: black-and-white tornado-wrecked houses with red “SCHREKK!” and yellow “KA-SHOOM” action words overlaying uprooted grassy green tufts and scattered broken lumber. In a kit-bashing frenzy, Kyle’s sculpture of a city block is topped by a hospital. The scenes are filled with layers of men falling over cliffs or trapped inside toppled trucks. Women in these paintings are called to the scene wearing dress suits, and one white woman clad in athletic gear raises a fist over a ripped-apart house.
Nothing is serene, settled or domesticated in Kyle’s work. “Life on the Farm” is a small shadow box with bronze, silver and pink sows, all nursing piglets. Below these are black-and-white movie stills: first one of a courtroom, then one of a fight in a ballroom, and finally one of a war hospital. This last scene, cribbed from Gone With the Wind, keys into the anxiety of unsettlement and displacement.
Kyle’s commentary on the mythology of white male displacement is an honest connection to the feelings of vulnerability and helplessness of the mythical postwar hero-white-male, as society becomes more equal and diverse, and yet his deliberate use of miniatures and comic books places this anxiety into the rather disarming context of pop fiction and nostalgia. All of the artist’s choices and techniques are concentrated around a central main theme, like an operatic tragedy.
Unlike plays or the opera, Kyle’s paintings are not storylines of rising action.
“These are deliberately fragmented,” he cautioned in an earlier conversation. “They are as if multiple stories have exploded.”
Viewers may see the artist as a war correspondent reporting from the front as reactionary forces collapse under their own weight. As we enter the bright future of diversity, equity and inclusion, we’re still picking our way through the rubble.
