The Twins of the Rec Room: Os Gemeos

Os Gemeos — “the twins,” in Portuguese — is the nom de plume of the twin Brazilian artists Gustavo and Otavio Pandolfo (b. 1974) of São Paulo, Brazil. Their work borrows the idioms of outsider and folk art in a style heavily influenced by the one-time graffiti artist Barry McGee. And though, like Mr. McGee, they might once have been artists of the street, their gallery-sized installation at Deitch Projects, “Too Far Too Close,” suggests they have since become artists of the rec room.The show places stand-alone paintings and stand-alone sculptures in an immersive environment — and it proves an uncomfortable mix. What unifies all the elements here are the spindly-limbed characters with fat, triangular heads and button eyes spaced wide apart that populate Os Gemeos’s neon-colored world. And what a quaint world it is: It reminded me of some touristy, seaside gift shop, where it’s difficult to distinguish the merchandize from the décor.Two large sculptural pieces, immediately visible upon entering the space, set the quirky-fun tone. A life-size car made of wood, and with a large Gemeos-type head atop it, is set closest to the door. It’s folksy and benign; if you stumbled upon it in some rural backyard surrounded by freaky wind chimes, you’d think, Neat. The head stares across the room to a huge pyramid constructed of wood and brightly colored signage, with another big head atop it. This one blows bubbles. Inside, the pyramid is mirrored: You can enter it and contemplate the cosmic cuteness of it all.A vast wall painting serves as a backdrop to the sculptures. It’s a bright, upbeat fantasy scene with floating Gemeos figures in motley clothing, as well as candy-colored fish and animals and balloons. In one scene, a chastely nude yellow girl sits in the mouth of an orange and green fish, which has balanced on its back a stack of little parti-colored houses and, on top of them, a character with a strange triangular headpiece and what looks like a putting green around his waist. Nearby are brightly colored stars, an orange and red kite, and a bird-beaked figure in a babushka. The artists could transfer the whole mural to a wall at Toys R Us and, I’m certain, not a single customer would suspect they were in the presence of art. Same with the adjacent wall, a shallow-relief installation using paintings, smaller sculptures, and found objects to create a sort of kiddie clubhouse feel.If these two walls form the decoration, and the sculptures are the rides keeping you interactively engaged, then the paintings hung salon style on a the third wall, painted pink, must be the merchandise. They come in sizes and formats to suit every taste. On one unframed horizontal panel, four bandits hide in the graffiti-ridden tunnels of the New York subway. One has no neck and an adorable Mohawk; another, carrying a sack of spoils, sports a polka-dot balaclava. These are thieves as imagined by a children’s book illustrator — except that even good children’s-book artists introduce some friction, some roughage into their stories. The Os Gemeos paintings at Deitch are, in contrast, emotionally two-dimensional: they put forth nothing that is challenging or upsetting or exciting or insightful or effectively satirical. It’s a show that feels packaged, and vetted by censors.The feel-good, multi-culti family in “It Is Supposed to be Raining, But It Doesn’t Rain” (2008) — one man is brown, another a darker yellow than that of the mother and children — stand in an empty plastic pool set, contrary to the title, in a largely green lawn. They’re lined up shoulder-to-shoulder, flat and clichéd. The chunkier child wears an Augustos Donuts T-shirt. To spice things up, the artists have used real sequins on a man’s purple suit. And, as in a badly composed family snapshot, one of the brightly colored houses in the background, this one pink, seems to sit on his head.In “Special Class” (2008), the kids seem, appropriately, like victims of genetic drift, mainly because their eyes are set so wide apart. But they don’t look any more malformed or maladjusted than the characters in the other paintings. Without the title, they’re just kids. A picture of a married couple with child, “Casou Com O Primo” (2007), has a heart-shaped face, cut into the picture’s wood panel, looking benevolently down upon a mustachioed man in a purple sequined suit standing rigidly next to his wife, who holds their child, a wee mermaid. And as in a tourist gift shop, one finds paintings decorating cast-off items: a nude woman painted on an old door, a landscape with many-colored houses beneath a sky with improbable balloons — pyramidal shapes floating by — painted on a slatted wooden door, a man and woman on a wooden table top, a face on an old frying pan, and a boxy, Picasso-esque guitar transformed into a body.“Too Far Too Close” continues a recent art-world habit of sentimentalizing childhood drawings and games with a logic that goes something like this: These things are freaky, so they must be art. Os Gemeos’s paintings and sculptural pieces are, however, just not freaky enough. The lack of pathos or substance in this work renders it merely decorative, something to hang up and forget.Until August 9 (18 Wooster St., between Canal and Grand streets, 212-343-7300).

The Twins of the Rec Room: Os Gemeos

The Twins of the Rec Room: Os Gemeos

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