It comes as no surprise to discover that Jeff Gabel is both an animated conversationalist and a card-carrying Proustian—his canvases, works on paper, rangy wall drawings, and chunky wood panels are built around lengthy handwritten texts that make up exacting and hilariously tart studies of some all-too-familiar personalities and situations. Casting a withering eye over his reliably dysfunctional milieu (in which art-world types rub up against regular Joes), the Brooklyn-based artist details a world at odds with itself: often awkward, routinely alienating, never less than a disappointment. Gabel characteristically introduces his fictional sad-sack antiheroes as "some guy" or "some other fucker," leaving us to fill in the names of equivalents from our own lives. Such is the mortifying precision of his observation that we needn't look... More >>>