Magical Mutilations

Carole Caroompas is among the most literary painters working today. The stories her discombobulating paintings tell, even though they sometimes appear to run the gamut from A to Z, are never linear. Instead, beginning with familiar fables, she happily proceeds to spindle, fold and otherwise deftly mutilate them.

“Carole Caroompas: The Lady of the Castle Perilous” is a 25-year survey organized by Anne Ayres for the gallery at Otis College of Art and Design, where the artist has been on the faculty for 16 years. Emphasizing the paintings of the last decade, the 40 works astutely chosen for the exhibition accomplish two things: First, they offer compelling evidence that Caroompas’ career follows an upward trajectory, with work progressively more rigorous and resolved as it proceeds; and, second, they lay out with clarity the sometimes surprising roots of her literary endeavor.

Who would ever have imagined that austere, process-oriented abstractions painted in 1972 would form the firm and coherent foundation for lush figurative odes to Hester Prynne and Zorro, painted during the last three years?

Caroompas works in series. The breakthrough in her art came around 1989, when she began a series of paintings that busted up traditional stories told by familiar fairy tales--”Beauty and the Beast,” “Rapunzel,” “Peter Pan” and more.

Take “Peter Pan,” the sexually ambiguous story of a lost boy who wouldn’t grow up--wouldn’t abandon his yearning for youthful male intimacies and a nurturing mother in order to enter the adult world of proscribed roles and responsibilities. Caroompas’ big (7-foot by 5-foot) vertical painting loosely recalls the face of a giant Tarot card, whose traditional allegorical figures she’s mixed up with images from circus posters, famous Baroque paintings, postwar American children’s readers and bawdy, sexist joke books.

The huge grinning head of a circus clown is pierced from the four corners of the picture by swords and sabers, and a regal medieval maiden looms above, her right breast exposed. Inside the jovial buffoon’s painted-on smile a young boy is seen measuring his little foot against the sole of his father’s much bigger shoe. Mischievous putti--including one modeled on Bronzino’s famously lascivious Mannerist cherub, who urges on an incestuous kiss between Cupid and his mother, Venus--flutter about before a background composed of crude cartoons featuring big-busted babes.

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Fairy tales were never quite like this before. Thoroughly Disneyfied today, they’ve also become bland, infantile and corporate. Caroompas at her best manages to endow her radically inventive retellings with just the sort of magical strangeness that once characterized her source material. Indeed, highly individualized reanimation of the dead is the pointed leitmotif for the next series, “Before and After Frankenstein: The Woman Who Knew Too Much.”

The artist’s feminist framework is evidenced in the nod to Mary Shelley and her extraordinary book. The story of a manufactured man, precariously assembled from scavenged parts, also reverberates against Caroompas’ technique. Throughout most of the 1970s and 1980s she had worked principally in the medium of collage, assembling all manner of found and clipped images into new forms.

The breakthrough for Caroompas’ art seems to have come from her abandonment of collage and her unabashed embrace of painting (talk about reanimating the dead!). As Ayres perceptively puts it in the show’s accompanying catalog, Caroompas relinquished the “cutting up and pasting down” of collage materials in favor of the “putting together” of disparate images, which is the basis for the collage aesthetic.

She was by no means the first to do so. Layered imagery, with Sigmar Polke its most significant exemplar, became standard vocabulary for painting in the 1980s. But “being first” is itself one of those revered fairy tales of modern American culture that’s worth reexamination.

Besides, Caroompas handles the difficult technique with aplomb. Take the bewitching “Bedside Vigil” (one of the Frankenstein series), which employs a red and yellow background of checkerboard “wallpaper” sporting the repeated image of a nurse bearing medication, against which floats a Victorian double bed. In attendance are a variety of hovering female figures, both far and near, floridly drawn in medieval and Renaissance style and painted bright green.

Each bears a sword or platter and the severed head of a man. Salome the seductress meets Judith the avenger in a courtly dance of earthly retribution. And they’re headed this way!

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One corner of the exhibition handily demonstrates the unlikely roots from which this sort of witty, elegant and in-your-face painting grew. It includes two works from 1972, when Caroompas was just out of art school, in which she played around with the emergent genre of process art that was then so much the fashion.

Using thick, viscous paint and hard supports such as glass and sheets of linoleum, she drew a quick grid of drippy, muddy color. The rigid structure of a grid, hallmark of Modernist abstraction, begins to sag and wobble under the pull of gravity.

Adjacent are two collages, both from 1975, in which the central image is formed from a grid of photographs. At the left are pictures of a man on a playing field lifting weights; at the right are pictures of the artist in a library, mimicking the bodybuilder’s actions by hoisting books.

Across the way is a painting from 1994-95, from the series “Hester and Zorro: In Quest of a New World.” Here the layered imagery is arrayed over a flat field of needlepoint: The masculine Modernist grid, gone droopy in her earliest work, is now emphatically feminized.

Caroompas’ journey from past to present is concisely laid out in this small corner of the gallery, which also introduces her most recent series of paintings. Stoical Hester Prynne, bearer of the scarlet A, has teamed up with dashing Zorro, maker of the signifying Z. The pair embarks on a kind of pictorial romance novel, which shapes up to be Caroompas’ most compelling body of work.

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* “Carole Caroompas: The Lady of the Castle Perilous,” Otis Gallery, 9045 Lincoln Blvd., Westchester, (310) 665-6905, through Jan. 24. Closed Mondays.