Art review

The art critic Peter Plagens has referred to a lot of artwork these days as “postart,” fabricated by “postartists” who create works “post-”—after—the known art-history lineage without ever referencing the masters or the movements that have brought them to where they are today.

Plagens’ point is that artists nowadays are no longer interested in their predecessors. The problem is it’s not that simple, especially when you run across an artist like David Adey, whose work is historically tied to its influences. But you might not fully understand this by observing what he creates.

You could call Adey a postartist; he’s simply more interested in the process of making art. Using hundreds of craft punches in various sizes and shapes, from hearts to hand rakes and everything in between, he punches out only the visible flesh tones of figures from People magazine covers and Bebe publicity posters.

The result is a tightly organized collage, pieced together like some forensic puzzle and pinned to stark, white Styrofoam backgrounds. It is less about where the fleshy specimens come from but, instead, how they fit together. If beauty is only skin deep, then it is also paper thin, and Adey demonstrates this flawlessly in his use of high-profile celebrities and top models, dissecting them and then resurrecting them into ghostly lugubrious shells of themselves. But why?

This is harder to answer. Certainly, you can find some wry commentary on pop society, see some humor in how he uses a baseball-bat form to define a woman’s cleavage and recognize a subtle Christian theme of life, death and resurrection. If what Plagens says is true, it doesn’t matter where Adey starts his artwork, where it takes him and how it ends. What matters is that the work is not as disingenuous as it seems, but full of life, beauty and the passion of making things. Something Adey does extremely well.

David Adey’s solo show, I’ve got a river of life flowing out of me, is on view at Luis De Jesus Seminal Projects, 2040 India St., through Nov. 20.