Devin Troy Strother

Devin Troy Strother’s paintings and sculpture are exploding with life — thick globs of paint, playful flames and smoke and brains drenched in rainbows. Warped cartoons nestle together in the orb of someone’s memory, then spill out in conversation as naturally as falling stars. Their oblong figures carry so much expression despite their simplicity, a single roving eye in side profile, at once agog and unfazed — an edge to their playfulness that evokes a specific urgency, that buzz around someone with an innate kinetic urge. I particularly like the paintings of hands sticking out from the left or right of the frame, fingers balancing paintbrushes, cigarettes, matches, sometimes all at once, like they’re hitchhiking their way through a Möbius strip. In a room, the accumulation of dynamic figures against pitch-black backgrounds have the effect of a hidden galaxy — perhaps the undercurrent of an already-cartoonish art world, an unacknowledged counter-orbit that maintains the stillness of those bright white walls. — Delighter #30