Charette's 'Orderly Chaos' finds optimism in the darkness

“We chased our pleasures here. Dug our treasures there. But can you still recall the time we cried? Break on through to the other side.”

— The Doors

In the summer of 2014, artist Jim Charette opened his studio (affectionately and disturbingly called the Abattoir) to the public for “Sad Little Boys,” a showing of paintings, drawings and assemblages.

His depictions of brawling boys, screaming toddlers and angry young men were profoundly haunting. It was a dark funhouse mirror reflection of pain, misogyny and the potential for violence in an era of marathon bombings, school shootings and frat boy denials of sexual assault.

Little has changed. But Charette has.

“An Orderly Chaos,” an exhibition at the Frederick Douglass Gallery (at Gallery X), while not entirely cheerfully benign, signals an emotional ascension for the artist, in which a certain level of joy has crept into his imagery, no doubt partly fueled by a relatively new and happy marriage and gaining a “step-tribe.”

His acrylic paintings include images of purple elephants, giant moths chasing people down the street, and vampires of both the emotional and literal kind.

His love of wordplay is gleefully intact throughout much of the show, such as in the print “Ladybugs of the Night,” which features oversized red beetles soliciting on a street corner.

A series of four paintings called “Boy Meets Girl Meets Girl Meets Boy Meets Boy Meets…” is a playful indictment of those who dare to judge others based on sexual preference. And it does it without a scornful finger-wagging.

Instead, adolescents shamelessly run and leap and swing and play in, over and under streaks and dabs of brilliant orange, electric green and night sky black, a cosmos of the imagination.

In a similar series “Come On In,” young people in bathing suits, trunks and goggles dive and cannonball over a background of magenta and milk chocolate brown, and against all odds, it works both aesthetically and in terms of narrative.

Charette also presents a numbers of tondi (round paintings). Each depicts an icon of the music world — Jim Morrison, Joey Ramone, Miles Davis and others — rendered in stencil form upon an actual vinyl LP record. While each has its own individual charms, the collective display acknowledges an enduring and interconnected cultural power.

The significance of music to the artist makes itself manifest in his series “Get On Up.” The title is a reference to the James Brown classic. Men strike rock ‘n’ roll poses atop repurposed book pages, many featuring Renaissance era imagery. One wears a baggy “big suit” which appears to be an allusion to the “Stop Making Sense”-era David Byrne.

Charette also displays a number of assemblages, made from recycled toys, boxes, clocks, and a water cooler.

In “Big Game Ready,” the head of a mannequin is streaked with blood and outfitted with a helmet and protective mask and then tightly jammed into a wooden box. It is both discomforting and oddly intriguing.

“Assemblage 5” melds several toy components together. The head of a cartoon rabbit sits on the muscular torso of some cyborgian beast, which then merges, at waist level, with a military transport vehicle. Painted slate grey, it is transformed into a sci-fi dystopian centaur.

As a whole, the exhibition has only a few weak spots. But therein lies its charm ... it is not a perfect world. Nor should it be.

But beneath his mildly sardonic veneer, Charette shines a light on the optimism even in the darkest corners of his imagination.

“An Orderly Chaos: The Art of Jim Charette” is on display in the Frederick Douglass Gallery at Gallery X, 169 William St., New Bedford until Oct. 31.

Don Wilkinson is a painter and art critic who lives in New Bedford. Contact him at Don.Wilkinson@gmail.com. His reviews run each week in Coastin’.