By Paul Varnell

Contributing writer

“Better Days Ahead” is the cheerfully optimistic title of artist Rob Bondgren’s first one-man show, now on view at the recently opened Finch Gallery on West Fullerton.

When you climb the steps to the second-floor gallery space, the first thing you notice is the number of multi-colored, plastic beach balls rolling around on the floor. Those more or less set the tone for the collection of 18 realistic, colorful paintings depicting beach and swimming pool scenes.

“Realistic,” that is, in the sense of representational, but not quite in the sense of showing things you are likely to see at pools or beaches. The paintings are full of hunky, naked or half-naked men, some engaging in genital display, cruising or groping other men. There is even an occasional bare-breasted woman. Many of the figures seem to include the viewer in their scene by looking out at him or her.

“It is about escapism in a way,” admits the 35-year-old artist. “The work in this show is first and foremost a reaction to my overwhelming disgust and fatigue with war, politics, terrorism and fear-mongering, and the most unfortunate politicization of sexuality. I began this series because I selfishly wanted to have fun painting people having fun. Bottom line, I wanted to escape.”

Born in Buffalo, N.Y., Bondgren spent most of his youth in upstate New York. His father was an artist, too, and Bondgren says he spent a good deal of time in his father’s studio also drawing and painting. At 18 he came to Chicago to study at the Art Institute, graduating in 1994, and has been here ever since. He now teaches in the Art Institute’s school of continuing studies.

If the exhibition has a thematic painting, it is the large canvas “Anderson’s Pool Party,” which shows the smiling CNN newscaster evidently hosting a party with more than a dozen good-looking men sitting or lying around the pool. Among them, one man is lying naked in a lounge chair, another has lowered his trunks to stare at his own penis and a third appears to be intensely preoccupied with a blow-up plastic doll. Bondgren has even inserted himself into this sybaritic scene, lying on an air mattress in the pool.

“Boy Was I Drunk,” the classic rationalization of heterosexual men for engaging in homosexuality, depicts several young military men lounging around along with one obvious civilian. It is not clear whether Bondgren means to imply the possibility of later sexual interaction or an awareness that even here there are reminders of war. Possibly both.

A companion piece, “Blowing Off Some Steam,” its title also suggestive of sexual release, has more overt sexuality, with one man pulling out his penis while another inspects the penis of a third man.

Perhaps the cleverest painting, “Sailors and Floozies Remix” adapts characters from American artist Paul Cadmus’s 1938 painting “Sailors and Floozies.” Just as sound engineers add and rearrange background elements in remixing a popular song, Bondgren places the clearly drunk sailors and the obviously available “floozies” trying to rouse their interest into a new background with more characters. Just for fun, notice the bizarrely sexual hat one of the woman wears.

Bondgren mentions Cadmus among the modern gay painters he particularly likes and has drawn on for ideas. He also mentions the American Charles Demuth, who painted scenes of sailors urinating and naked men (including himself) at a bathhouse, and the contemporary British pop artist David Hockney, whose scenes of young men around California swimming pools are well-known.  

Other paintings include: “Looking for a Stupid Boy,” which shows a well-dressed man in his car wearing a tell-tale red tie—long a symbol of homosexuality—cruising a young man wearing red bikini trunks; “At (or On) the Wheel,” which shows a well-built man seated in his car holding a sizable erection and looking out at people as if to say, “Hey, how you like a taste of this, buddy; and “Demon Dog,” which depicts a punk-looking young man with a mohawk haircut and a Marine bulldog or “demon dog” tattoo.

Several of the paintings have areas of white space suggesting incompleteness. The boy in “Cruising for a Stupid Boy,” for instance, is rendered only down to his red bikini, but not below. It is as if they need a spritz of science fiction writer Philip K. Dick’s “Ubik,” that spray-in-a-can that preserves or enhances the reality or development of things. Bondgren may mean to suggest that those areas contain nothing of erotic interest or that other things are going on that are being left out. Maybe viewers are supposed to fill in the blanks.

“I never set out to change the world by making [these paintings],” says Bondgren, “But it has helped me get through three years of nightly news and that just has to be enough for me—for now.”

“Better Days Ahead,” an exhibition of new paintings and works on paper by Rob Bondgren, at the Finch Gallery, 2648 W. Fullerton (2nd Floor), is on view through Nov. 23. Open Fridays, 6-9 p.m., and by appointment.