Mark George (1970), has been making Pop- influenced works with a distinctly '50s and '60's sensibility since the early 2000s. George's work includes a suite of paintings that address concerns of figuration, as well of those that tackle land and sky.

He frames the paintings as a reaction to (and against) a prevailing ethos of sustained happiness: a reality where "no bad vibes" are ever allowed to permeate or interupt a perfectly coifed surface of calm. His is a world of real emotions and experiences even if they are painted in a winkingly flat style that recalls Roy Lichtenstein and Margaret Kilgallen.

By deploying methods used in commercial sign painting and Pop culture, George is able to signal a feeling of timelessness where the past and present collide. Like a pre-Santa Fe Dennis Hopper, there's a hard sunshine and clean khakis vibe to the pieces that offer a counterpoint in materiality to the emotive content therein. Driven largely by the female figures, tension is taut beneath the surface. The viewer imagines fingernails driven into palms, hair twisted into tiny knots, and that prickling sweat feeling. It's the feeling of being asked to do just one more thing, when you've already working above capacity. Here, in this extravagant hard-edged reality where no matter the situation, that winged eyeliner does not smudge, eyes nonetheless teeter on the edge of weeping.

George's is an aesthetic that recalls comics and pulp fiction covers, that often have a relationship to a fashion aesthetic from mid-century americana. This a gaspingly dramatic world, with signs that gesture towards a kind of authoress narrative--indeed, the paintings seem to want to inhabit that Barthian realm operating outside of the boundaries of personality and genius. Instead into a familiar but hard to pin down story.