Irony may be the shackles of youth, as Michael Stipe told us, but it also appears to be an evergreen snare for middle-aged white guys. For his debut show at David Zwirner, Josh Smith, who gained fame for brushy paintings of his own name, fills the gallery’s capacious 19th Street digs with more than a hundred canvases that he can’t possibly take seriously. Only one bears his signature, but some 37 picture an empty-hooded Grim Reaper, holding a scythe and wearing a coat of many colors. Meditations on mortality and fate feel far from the artist’s mind, however. Smith’s works operate more like placeholders, interchangeable iterations of color schemes and details—vultures, bats, leaves, torches, decorative borders—signifying next to nothing. Another of his motif resembles a skeletal spider and likely derives from the figure of Death in Jan van Eyck’s Last Judgement at the Metropolitan Museum. Though Smith’s compostions may aspire to the level of Edvard Munch, whose paintings they distantly recall, they more closely resemble the schoolbook doodles of a Norwegian metal fan.
Still, a group of 55 closely hung paintings of turtles that really look more like birds or insects, manages to avoid portentousness. Though Smith paints with a studied nonchalance that could be taken for Expressionism if it were actually expressive, here, it’s possible to find unabashed delight in way he applies his palette of bright hues. Despite the artist’s steadfast refusal of meaning (or maybe because of it), his works remain likeable instances of painterly invention and possibility—even when his subjects spell doom and gloom.