Dan Fenelon’s sunny folky paintings are giving way to a darker, more mature style

Dan Fenelon’s sunny mixed-media paintings, with influences varying from Keith Haring to Oaxacan folk art, seem like they’re painted with summer in mind. Simple, two-dimensional, somehow tribal: Almost everyone understands them and can agree they’re art, the kind that would look great hanging in your kitchen. They’re shiny, commercial, and very seductive, which is why Fenelon’s new show at DDR Projects, “Wavedog Goes West,” is so refreshing. The artist, who signs his work either eponymously or as Wavedog, has found a new way of making his exhaustively detailed canvases, and it’s as bracing as his older work has been embracing.

Start with Trips, Angels & Birds, a typical Fenelonian epic: a view of an angel and the things that surround him. Drawn flat, the angel somehow maintains a beatific expression, and he/she brings a certain air of calm to Fenelon’s frenetic style.

Then migrate past Fenelon’s painted-on toys and fun works like Monster Robot—an incredibly detailed little android with a second head poking out of his stomach—to Cyclops, one of Fenelon’s newest, darkest paintings.

See what he’s done? You won’t at first—not until you see Gladiator, a similar, more explanatory work. But what Cyclops is is a photograph of one of Fenelon’s painted toys (a smoking rabbit, perhaps) somehow refracted via computer with a kaleidoscope effect, then printed as a giclee.

Make sense? It’s disorienting until you realize you’re seeing part of the toy—surrounded, enveloped by all Fenelon’s trademark filigree detail, hand-painted on the giclee print.

That’s it. Now take a spin through all Fenelon’s toys and you’ll understand: His Gladiator painting is a take on his Maximus painted toy, to which he’s added spikes (or else it’s the other spiky toy, Gladiator #4).

This part of the show is Fenelon on Fenelon. It’s confusing and, ultimately, every bit as engrossing as his earlier work.

DAN FENELON: WAVEDOG GOES WEST DDR PROJECTS | 1532 E BROADWAY | LONG BEACH 90802 | 562.590.9030 | DDRPROJECTS.COM | OPEN WED-FRI NOON-8PM | SAT 11AM-6PM | SUN 11AM-5PM | THROUGH JUNE 4 | FREE

Tags: art, dan fenelon, ddr projects, Long Beach, mixed media