ART REVIEW

Retro Chic: Suddenly (or so it seems), grown women are wearing baby-sized, rhinestone T-shirts in myriad pastel shades with their elephant-leg jeans, advertisements for disco tapes are all over late-night TV, and John Travolta has returned as an icon of retro chic. “Saturday Night Fever,” a group show curated by Michael Cohen and Catherine Liu at Thomas Solomon’s Garage, plays into the apparently pandemic nostalgia for all things 1970s--but goes quite seriously awry.

The exhibition is filled with mirrored surfaces (Liz Larner); glittering lights (Nancy Barton); sparkling fringe (Karen Kilimnik); the heavily made-up face of Kiss glam-king Gene Simmons (Kenneth Weaver); and bits and pieces of Wonder Bread plastic packaging (Michael Gonzalez). Pink cans of Tab and green cans of Fresca were available at the opening, adding to the general flavor of things.

It’s a given that the music to which one responds most emotionally is the music that played at the time of one’s sexual awakening. The curators of “Saturday Night Fever” play this card, well aware of the soft spots of their post-baby-boom audience. But what of irony? It is here in spades, but it is the kind of irony the mass market assiduously fosters, because it, too, is a hot commodity, especially for this particular target group.

“Saturday Night Fever” takes as one of its models the endlessly reflective surface of the spinning disco ball. The show teases us with questions of subjectivity, desire and fantasy, but it fractures those questions into a thousand irretrievable pieces, drowning them out under a propulsive, unsyncopated, 4/4 beat.

* Thomas Solomon’s Garage, 928 N. Fairfax Ave., (213) 654-4731, through April 29. Closed Sundays and Mondays.