The Wake

Anyone who has been to a freak show, or looked guiltily at a deformed person walking down the street knows the feeling, the strange sensation of looking at something that is usually out of sight, something on the fringes of society. Chris Mars’ paintings evoke this same feeling. They are repulsive, frightening, unsettling, yet impossible to ignore.

“I think there is more beauty in those eccentricities,” says Mars, 44, at a recent artist-led tour of his paintings. Mars, a local legend for his involvement in the seminal punk rock band The Replacements, has traded in his drumsticks for paintbrushes full time. Unlike so many musicians who make a half-hearted jump into acting or politics, this wasn’t some pompous move on Mars’ part. He has been drawing since childhood.

“Music was more of a distraction for me. I always wanted to make art,” he says. His original inspiration was his older brother who was institutionalized for schizophrenia when Mars was six years old. The callous treatment of his brother in those institutions fostered a very critical view of medical facilities, and medicine as a whole. “The Curse of Head Medicine,” for example, features a grotesque image of doctors prying open a head and releasing its contents. All of the doctors, however, are looking away from the head, ignoring what they are doing.

Much of Mars’ art is political: his work “VM-5: The Poor Steward” is a jab at Pat Roberts and his call for the assassination of Hugo Chavez. Roberts is flanked by witches and skeletons, one of which is holding a scroll that reads “Thou shall not kill.” Another work depicts Cindy Sheehan exhaling the ghost of her son. Mars criticizes the commoditization of beauty and society’s obsession with the media in works such as “The Vanity Card.”

On a technical level, Mars’ paintings are impressive. The detail he achieves through varying layers of oil paint and varnish is startling. He can take an imagined something and make it look as real as someone sitting on the bus, which makes the monsters and the demons that are his regular motifs all the more frightening. He also uses scoring and scratching to accentuate textures and boundaries within his works.

From afar, Mars’ images seem cluttered, squeezed into an ornate frame. Upon closer inspection, however, each figure becomes its own fascinating little portrait. This cluttering reflects Mars’ process, which is rarely planned out.

“I like to be open to what I feel,” says Mars.

Mars’ paintings are on display through Nov. 20 at the Minneapolis Institute of Art along with collage artist James F. Cleary as a part of the MAEP local artist gallery.