At the opening of Mark Ryan Chariker’s latest show at 1969 Gallery, an oddball line of poetry by Patti Smith repeated in my head: “Jesus died for somebody’s sins, but not mine.” Smith, a lifelong Christian whose oeuvre is laced with biblical references, proved with this utterance that her faith could only be bested by her punk-rock bravado. Chariker’s current show proves him to be a kindred spirit, whose discerning eye holds in equal esteem the sublime and the laughably incidental.

        Chariker has long been inspired by Rococo France, where painters like Jean-Antoine Watteau gained fame for renderings of frolicking dilettantes in verdant outdoor spaces. Indeed, many of his older paintings were almost identical to Watteau’s characteristic fete galantes in subject matter: figures tumbling over one another in the rustic outdoors while doing nothing in particular. Chariker’s most recent show has split Watteau’s signature pictorial motif in half—the figure paintings are one thing, the landscapes another. I’d forgive anyone who assumed they’d always been separate—the former’s angsty twenty-somethings can seem antipathetic to the beauty of the latter’s effulgent foliage.

        Though Chariker’s landscapes maintain an air of revelrous impressionism, on the whole, they’re more akin to those of Song Dynasty China than Western Europe. Fusing the omniscient grandiosity and austere color palette of the North with the intimate vistas of the South, he conjures paradises which are impossible in their greatness but plausibly inhabitable—an odd collision of the sublime and the quotidian that’s liable to effect befuddled chuckles in viewers. (I know it’s unlikely that Chariker is explicitly drawing inspiration from the likes of Fan Kuan and Ma Yuan, but the parallels are too many to be completely accidental. Like the greatest of the Northern Song, he incorporates stairs, paths, and entryways throughout his landscapes, beckoning viewers to imagine themselves traversing each one. And his tendrilly, crab claw-like branches bear striking resemblance to those of Song legend Guo Xi.)
 

        Chariker’s figures, however, are more Grant Wood than Guo Xi—their self-serious exteriors are constantly belied by inscrutable mien. Each seems vaguely schizophrenic, constantly aware of the fact that they’re being watched—by fellow subjects, or worse, viewers—and making the necessary physiognomic adjustments. In one work, a man (though in Chariker’s paintings, they never really ceased to be boys) with a conspicuous neck tattoo—a guillotine—stares at another, who uneasily reads a book. Another depicts two vaguely exasperated women, whose empty countenances place them in the awkward moments between emotions. (Chariker gives us a hint here with the title, A Pause in the Argument, but most of the time he isn’t so forthcoming—the majority of this show’s paintings are untitled.) We’ll never know what big feelings weigh on the hearts of Chariker’s subjects—they’re too embarrassed to tell us.
 

        For their disparate subject matter, the paintings are held together by Chariker’s one-of-a-kind technique—he doesn’t paint a picture as much as he stipples it into existence. His facture is uniform and granular, as if he’s pecking the canvas over and over again. While the technique bears similarity to Seurat’s pointillism, Chariker’s subjects, figures and landscapes alike, are tangible in a way that Seurat’s misty compositions don’t come close to achieving.

        To label Chariker’s brushwork “obsessive” would be like calling water wet—it’s clear viewing the painstaking movements of his wrist that every ounce of his life-force goes into a painting. Obvious as it is, I can’t help but laugh at the idea: in many cases, Chariker’s spiritual outpouring has produced scenes fraught with quotidian awkwardness, not the transcendent masterpieces one might expect. In his use of otherworldly means to produce a remarkably worldly end, Chariker’s practice much resembles one of his little-known influences: online message boards. He’s specifically cited a fascination with the fanatical fanbase of Under the Silver Lake, who scour the film’s every millisecond for near imperceptible cryptographical clues. (They’ve gone as far as to scan its fireworks patterns for subliminal messages in Morse code.)

        I like to think of Chariker’s figurative subjects as these netizens, taking as their muse his breathtaking corpus of landscapes. Directionless as it may seem, the deep affectedness in their eyes had to originate somewhere. Why is it that when encountering something beautiful, we find only the repulsive, manic parts of ourselves? I don’t know, and Chariker doesn’t either. But his canvases are gorgeous, excruciatingly so, and worthy of the obsession they’re inspired by.

Charles Venkatesh Young is a Chicago-based journalist of the arts interested in fusing art theory with bodily experience. He has contributed to the New Art Examiner, Chicago Reader, Newcity, and Whitehot Magazine.