Martin Wong's Brick Monument to Popeye

Six heavy plywood panels shaped like jigsaw cuts riff on Popeye, turning the cartoon icon into humanoid and architectural forms. Small motors create a gentle, dance-like motion, while the figures sway like a chorus line. The work softens brick and exaggerations by giving Popeye’s palms, nose, elbows, and oversized earlobes a sociable, assertive presence. The queering of the macho sailor reframes his rivalry with Bluto and his interrupted romance with Olive Oyl through a male-centered eros. The exhibition centers transmutation, converting pop-culture ephemera into fanfic-like reanimation. Tattoo paintings and other pop vernaculars extend the fascination with cross-cultural boundary crossing.

"Like a slo-mo Off-Off-Broadway chorus line or targets in a shooting gallery, six painted, heavy, jigsaw-cut plywood panels riffing on the cartoon character Popeye sway an understated dance number, small motors whirring gently behind. In this posthumous exhibition at PPOW, artist Martin Wong's strange, hybrid take on the classic cultural icon metamorphoses Popeye into architectural forms as much as humanoid figures, painted as curving brickwork, variously weathered."

"There's a kind of sociable quality to Wong's retakes that softens both the brick and the insistent phallic exaggerations he makes of Popeye's bulbousness. In Wong's hands, Popeye's hammy palms, nose, elbows, and even oversized earlobes protrude assertively priapic. And there's a logic to this "in-the-navy" queering of the macho sailor man, whose supposed trysting with dame Olive Oyl is always interrupted by the homophiliac eros of Bluto, his perennial male nemesis."

"This is, in short, a show about transmutation: goofy soft "flesh" into something firmer, the ephemera of pop culture into a more idiosyncratic celebration of fanfic re-animation. Queer and magpie in sensibility, Wong imaginatively repurposed anachronistic cultural products and images. Over two decades after his death, the artist's sensibility still "pops.""

Read at Hyperallergic