Full-Tilt Figuration

Over-the-top, in-your-face, cartoon-inspired art has an enduring niche in today's scene, and now it has a new nomenclature. According to the literature accompanying Deitch Projects' "Mail Order Monsters," this group exhibition is an exploration of "freaked-up figuration" (or, more precisely, an unprintable version of this phrase.) The hallmark of this figuration — we'll call it F.U.F. for short — isn't subnormal drawing and painting skills, nor decrepit artists' materials, but a predilection for bizarre, random, and often sadistic imagery, presented withhighlycompetentcomicbook élan.

The subtler examples of F.U.F. in "Monsters" feature jarring, kaleidoscopic images drawn from mass-media culture, their full-tilt colors clanging with the gallery's chartreuse-painted floors. Cruder F.U.F. work depicts spilling guts, phallic noses, violent penetrations of bodies, and flying organic matter, which may or may not be vomit, guts, or excrement; the particulars seem less important than the penchant for general scuzziness. One work, Wes Lang's giant Golliwog doll, crossed the insensitivity line, and was removed from the installation.) The means of creating these effects, however, are not particularly novel, as most are carefully crafted in standard artists' materials: paint, ink, collage, and, in one case, video.

Arranged in Deitch's two rooms without the formality of wall labels, the installation has the impressively high energy and spirits of a hyper-decorated dorm room. It also has a certain claustrophobia of intention; viewed together, the works reinforce the suspicion that sometimes nothing is more conventional than the need to look outlandish.

Nevertheless, some pieces provoke in subtle and intriguing ways. Tomoo Gokita's five gouaches from 2006 and 2007 rely exclusively on blacks and grays to shape peculiar hybrids of humans and machines; the harsh illumination of his delicate tones lends a genuine eeriness to faceless, handless figures. The intimacy of Cleon Peterson's untitled array of 16 small acrylic paintings (2007) effectively contrasts with their depictions of anonymous violence.

Elsewhere, gallery-goers will find Dennis Tyfus's three huge, faux-naif works in black ink and acrylic distinctly confrontational, and not necessarily edifying. But Eddie Martinez' cheerfully expressionistic mixed–media image (2007) of bug-eyed characters with a fish bowl and Smurf doll seems all heart.

High-tech, mass-media sensory overloading inspires several works. Ben Jones's vast, untitled multi-panel painting from 2007 covers an entire wall with cartoonish, Day-Glo-colored aliens and robots. Joe Grillo's drawings and paintings with collaged elements (all 2007) brim with swirling images of consumer goods, comic-book figures, and science fiction contraptions. In Takeshi Murata's video, faces periodically melt and morph against a background of churning, psychedelic colors, while a soundtrack tinkles and burbles.

Viscerally unpleasant textures are the forte of Francine Spiegel and Taylor McKimens. Working in a highly realistic mode, Ms. Spiegel paints obscurely gesturing figures covered with various kinds of goo representing, it seems, every effluence of humankind and nature. Mr. McKimens's large, cartoonlike canvas, "Melt Down on the Blue 66" (2007), pictures a woman on the hood of a pickup truck, her head covered by a battered cardboard box. Every surface of truck and figure sags and oozes, as if all were turning to muck — or, more specifically, to sewage, judging by the hovering flies.

The most appealing trait of these works is their youthful energy and defiance. But exhibiting them en masse has a peculiar way of diluting the fun: where subversion is the norm and so easily rewarded, it loses much of its potency. One begins to wonder: Are these the spontaneous expressions of the truly marginal and maimed, or the calculated efforts of young professionals advancing up the career ladder? Likely the truth lies somewhere in between, and this probably bodes well for their futures in the art world.

It may not speak particularly well of that world, though. One of the most striking aspects of "Monsters" is its complete unawareness of pre-1960s art. With the exception of Mr. Gokita's gouaches and the strongest of Mr. Grillo's paintings, which shows some energetic color sequences, there's no discrimination at all between illustration and fine art: between images relying on style to accent the passively rendered, and images gaining gravity through the articulate force of forms. One gets the impression that Goya's "Disasters of War" would be no more useful to these artists than a Conan the Barbarian comic; There's no evidence of an appreciation of what Max Ernst and Francis Bacon got from the masters, and how they imparted weight to their own weird images through compositional tensions of line and color. This would take a whole other order of ambition on the part of these young artists, and in this respect, F.U.F. is more F.U. that it knows.

Until September 29 (76 Grand St., between Greene and Wooster streets, 212-343-7300).