At AS220 (115 Empire Street, Providence, through January 24), Paul Roustan of East Providence presents photos of naked models (almost all women) that he's painted with stripes and patterns and various virtuoso effects. A woman's pregnant belly is painted to resemble the earth, eclipsing a spotlight in the background that doubles as the sun. A real tarantula crawls up the breast of a woman painted with a white spider web that glows against her black-painted skin. Roustan's body paintings have flashy airbrush or spray-can style and exude a sexy fetishistic vibe.
I'm fascinated by the shot of a model painted with blue-on-blue floral pattern that matches the wallpaper behind her, and shots of models posed in crumbling buildings (or sets) and painted to resemble cracked walls or shattered glass. One of these women appears to have a gaping hole right between her breasts. I'm by turns attracted and repulsed by the trompe l'oeil illusions, the undercurrent of violence percolating through the images, and the way the naked ladies become mysteriously one with their surroundings, like chameleons or liquid mercury Terminators.
Read Greg Cook's blog at gregcookland.com/journal.
Related:
Two sides of life, Review: Dan Wood and Pippi Zornoza at AS220, Zacchilli + Kent's 'Night For Day,' Test, and Planka at AS220, More 
- Two sides of life
"I started as a commercial artist, and I want to finish as a business artist," the Pop artist Andy Warhol wrote in 1975. "Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art."
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The giant headline on the poster hanging in the window of AS220’s Project Space proclaims: "Antichrist Is Alive, and a Male Jew, Falwell Contends."
- Zacchilli + Kent's 'Night For Day,' Test, and Planka at AS220
Mickey Zacchilli and Natalja Kent's installation "Night for Day" at AS220's Project Space (93 Mathewson Street, Providence, through October 30) is like a manic, feral, black-and-white, punk, strobe light, spook house — just in time for Halloween.
- Review: Umberto Crenca's introspective retrospective at AS220
If you've been around the Providence art scene very long, you've surely heard the story. In the early 1980s, Umberto Crenca exhibited at the Antonio Dattorro Studio Gallery and the Providence Journal panned his art as shallow and simplistic.
- Review: Roustan at AS220; and 'Seeing Through Lines'
Paul Roustan is a virtuoso painter of odd subjects. Namely, the Pawtucket artist airbrushes makeup directly onto the naked bodies of fit models, which he presents in photographs.
- Museums and Galleries preview: Looking ahead
In November, incoming Speaker of the House John Boehner and fellow Republicans called for the Smithsonian to shutter its National Portrait Gallery show surveying gay identity in a century of art.
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Providence printmaking continues to be the primary representative of the city's art in books from Street World (2007) to Paper Politics: Socially Engaged Printmaking Today (2009) to the Museum of Modern Art's Modern Women (2010). It's a printmaking of posters and zines, do-it-yourself art often operating underground, on the streets, outside the usual institutions.
- Review: JustSeeds' ''Resourced!'' focuses on ecology at AS220
The political printmaking group JustSeeds was begun by Josh MacPhee in Portland, Oregon, in 1998 as a way to distribute art and posters.
- Does the local food movement really work?
Providence cultural center AS220's panel discussion series Action Speaks! continues with a look at the "local food" movement.
- 10 exhibits that are worth another look
Here's our rundown of the best art of '10.
- Slideshow: ''Eva Hesse Studiowork'' at the ICA; Tory Fair's ''Testing a World View (Again)'' at the deCordova
This slideshow accompanies Greg Cook's review of "Eva Hesse Studiowork" at the ICA through October 10, 2011, and Tory Fair's “Testing a World View (Again)" at the deCordova Sculpture Park through April 29, 2012.
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Topics:
Museum And Gallery
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