Wandering around the Met on this dreary drizzling Wednesday I visited my usual haunts (i.e. The Temple of Dendur, the El Greco room, John Singer Sargent's Madame X) and was about to head out to get my taxes done when I happened on the sign advertising Raqib Shaw at the Met. I almost turned away but when the hot-blooded Latin in me saw the colorful photo, I couldn't resist and made a beeline up the stairs to check out the carnival.

What I found was a quite sparkly and attractive yet intimate collection of mixed media paintings. Raqib Shaw is Indian by birth and spent much of his time in Kashmir before going on to study at Central Saint Marten's in London. His work and use of such wide ranging media attests to his exposure to eastern and western cultures, including Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Christian and, yes, even pop culture. The first set of paintings were recreations of some of Hans Holbein the Younger's courtly portraits. But far from simply reinterpreting them, Shaw makes them grotesque reinventions of the royal court with human bodies attached to monstrous animal heads. Each noble sits against a stark white background (unlike Holbein's dark backdrops), which serves to heighten yet somehow sterilize the madness of each portrait. Shaw crowns the beautifully embroidered and opulently jeweled court dress of Lady Guilford with an ape's head placed at an unseemly angle and spewing bright crimson blood from her headdress, nostrils and mouth. Rabid ostrich heads, crazed skulls, barbed wire and bared fangs are some recurring motifs in the portrait series. For Anne of Chrysanthemums, one of Henry VIII's wives, Shaw surrounds Lady Anne with a sky full of magnificently arrayed butterflies and a garden of oversized flowers which hides a lizard and snake. From Anne's ghastly head rise a crown of blood and sprouting from her neckare tangled vines (or veins) holding swords and dismembered limbs pushing bloody syringes. The effect is distracting because our vision is so focused on the crystals, sequins and shiny enamel paint; the eye is so easily distracted by artifice and bling. This distraction keeps us from focusing intently on the horribly nightmarish animals and they become instead innocuous caricatures.

Shaw overstimulates us with his acid trip colors and A.D.D. compositions, especially in Absence of God IV ... The Blind Butterfly Catcher, which is evocative of Murakami'sTan Tan Bo Puking aka Gero Tan. Swarms of butterflies, birds and even alligators fly through the sprawling evening sky above while a plethora of winged creatures, including reptiles rodents and apes hold princely, tasseled parasols as they sit atop ruined Greek temples. It reads like a Bosch allegory with a mish mash of anthropomorphic animal species. Down below, a majestically florid garden of multicolored blooms creeps up the temples' columns like ivy. This piece is almost too much to handle with the explosion of color and texture created by the intricately rendered cloisonne' effect of the enamel paint and crystals. Yet the juxtaposition here of classical structures with a bedazzled orgy of color and freakish fauna is genius. Minimalist, it's not!

What I loved most was Shaw's tongue-in-cheek depiction of Vegas showgirls inAbsence of God after Holbein. At the base of the painting are two Vegas showgirls with the outrageous bodies, rhinestones and costumes normally associated with dancers. But instead of the gorgeous face to go along, Shaw has the heads of a horse sporting the famed Vegas feathered headdresses. Clever, indeed.

February 18, 2009