IV. He meets his mother 1998
oil on canvas
36 x 48 in.

The paintings of London-born artist David Forbes take the viewer through the shadowed corners of a circus gone haywire. His Bosch-like compositions teem with surreal creatures in carnivalesque costumes, toys, demons, and genitalia, all in bright, heavily saturated colors amid hallucinogenic landscapes. They chart obscure regions of the psyche and spin color and symbol into a hellish sort of rapture. According to the artist, "Stations of the Cross" (one of the two series in the exhibition) was made "to alleviate incipient madness associated with unruly brain-visitors, hallucinations, and spells of ‘absence.’" Like massive spider webs, the canvases have captured the freakier, wayward bits of a frenzied imagination and leave them suspended in space to torture one another.