Musical Comedy Medley #6, 1995 Musical Comedy Medley #4, 1995 Musical Comedy Medley #3, 1995 Musical Comedy Medley #2, 1995 Musical Comedy Medley #7, 1995

thomas trosch at jessica fredericks gallery by John Zinsser Thomas Trosch makes aggressively foppish paintings. Huge-eyed figures, decked out in period fashions and all manner of filigree, stand and address each other with cartoon- style speech bubbles. In this show, called "Musical Comedy Medley," the words have been co-opted from musical comedy lyrics of the '40s and '50s penned by the likes of Cole Porter and Lorenz Hart. (In a hilarious previous series, Trosch appropriated texts from Japanese instructional books meant to teach businessmen English). Trosch presents his loaded tableaux on white paper-like grounds. He sketches in parts of his figures in graphite pencil, loads up other areas with brushed or palette-knifed impasto surfaces and generally lets sloppy physical painterliness run the gamut. In this respect he comes across as a kind of drag- ball version of Cy Twombly. A more obvious historical reference, though, are the exquisitely eccentric social dioramas of Florine Stettheimer from the '20s. (Trosch's work was in fact included in Michael Duncan's recent curatorial homage to Stettheimer's work at Holly Solomon Gallery.) In Musical Comedy Medley No. II (with lyrics by Lorenz Hart, with various book & play titles), 1995, two women stand in thickly-painted gowns looking at a framed painting of a woman in Victorian evening dress with full bustle and accompanying parasol. All three figures are rendered in gobs of frosting-like paint. (They look displaced from a Carvel ice cream cake). In the left foreground, a generic Jean Arp- like modernist free-standing sculpture vies for attention. One woman has a thought balloon with text that says (in part): "First I am serious then I'm delirious, the change in temperament is quite mysterious. My teeth are chattering. My brains are scattering away. That's love that's love...." The other woman's speech balloon is filled with a run-on stream of book titles: The Romantic Age Summer and Smoke, The Outrageous Mrs.Palmer, The Climax of Rome.... More telling, perhaps, of Trosch's own feelings is the speech of a woman in a Westchester Country Club-style pool party, who says, "Which is dreamier, Arcadia or Bohemia?" Or the utterance of a "musical comedy" character from a third painting, who states, "I thoroughly pitched the woo, from the heights of Valhalla to Kalamazoo." Overall, it's the overdetermined physical nature of Trosch's paintings that lifts them above being mere wry ditties. His pictures veer toward disaster with their scrapes and scumbles and cascades of paint (think mid-career Malcolm Morley). Moreover, there's a sick quality not unlike that found in "outsider" art that keeps the Trosch's program edgy and gives it an of- the-'90s feeling. A note on the gallery: Trosch formerly showed with Jose Freire (Fredericks' old boss). Fredericks' gallery is a fresh addition to the West Chelsea strip, housed in the below-stairs level of the single townhouse on the now-established 22nd Street Dia block. To date it has done solo shows with Eric Wolf and John Wesley. May 22 - June 30 Jessica Fredericks Gallery, 504 West 22nd St., 633-6555 John Zinsser is a New York painter and writer.