John Parot

Sudden Urge, 2007.

A lot of eye candy in the world of fine art nowadays features magical animals and psychotropic landscapes, and carries a message of ritualized polymorphous sexuality—art of what I would term “the gay utopia.”

One-time Chicago resident Edie Fake has become somewhat recognized for Gaylord Phoenix, a beautiful fantastical comic book narrative of transgender transmutation, but our town’s premier champion of trippy queer-identified graphic arts is John Parot, known for deploying pink crystal mountains and rococo text long before such iconography was ubiquitous among the pointy-shoes-and-silk-scarf crowd.

Visionary sexuality serves as a subtext for his latest jampacked solo show, “Biological Exuberance,” which takes its title from an acclaimed revisionist book (published in the late 1990s) on homosexuality in the animal kingdom. The conceptual heaviness mostly ends with the title; primarily the show is a dazzlingly coordinated orgy of fashion nostalgia and hard-edged geometric abstraction—much like the wonderful Deadtech solo show (up through Tuesday 18) by expatriate Chicago art and music hero Jeremy Boyle.

Parot’s show features more than a dozen wall pieces, mostly combining ink, gouache, and collage, and specializing in a repeated motif of a face and intersecting chopped-up border trim, integrated into images of dark mountains and spiderwebs (and mostly in the Goth/New Wave palette of black, white and neon pink). Parot’s high school allegiance to Bauhaus, the Cure, and the Velvet Underground is affirmed in cassette labels obscured by paint.

The installations in this West Side gallery space repeat many of these patterns, but also incorporate other markers of teen reminiscence: Polaroids, flannel shirts, vodka bottles, floppy disks and VHS tapes. No matter the vision, Chicago artists excel at vivid visual overload.