"Today's Man"
John Connelly Presents, through Sept 13.

For his current group show "Today's Man," John Connelly has summoned together more than 50 works by established and emerging male artists that consist solely of representations of men. The result is an eclectic, never-tiring and often-troubled version of man-on-man action carried out on canvas and paper.

Connelly displays these mostly small-scale productions in a bombarding, all-over fashion, covering the gallery walls in disparate styles that compete for attention. Themes quickly develop, particularly the abundance of ornate decorative motifs. The dandyish patterning ranges from Sam Gordon's haunting skull self-portrait set against the backdrop of a rainbow-colored rinse to Nick Lowe's rich graphite rendering of an Arabian interior that overwhelms the male figures pumping iron in the picture's foreground. Michael Wetzel utilizes ornamentation to wonderful ends in his pastiche Civil War painting of soldiers fighting amid floral-printed sheets strewn across a lawn.

What is missing is any strong sense of politics. Many works here fall into the pseudopunk DIY collage-and-scribble aesthetic that seems less agitated than masturbatory (two even cite "cum" as a medium). Figurative portraiture, however, is at its most prescient. Along with Alex Katz and Pieter Schoolwerth, newcomer Mathew Cerletty turns in an exceptional performance. In his painting Birthday Boy, a sickly youth rests his head on a pillow, his lips cracked and eyes jaundiced; ribbons wrapped around his neck appear to be strangling him. Young white men of the last superpower are no longer in such a sure-footed or privileged position. And an emerging generation of male artists seems to realize it.—Christopher Bollen