Wardell Milan’s second solo exhibition at Taxter & Spengemann comprises photographs, work on paper, and paper collages that evidence the artist’s fixation on the subtle dissimilarities that define beauty, love, degradation, and violence.

The artist builds densely referential tabletop dioramas, which contain architecture, people, artworks, nature, and text that are both personally and historically relevant. The large scale color photographs of these temporary sculptures are at once romantic and critical, open ended and concise representations of the artist’s particular experience as he reflects upon the state of things. One could still dream to devise an optimistic antidote against the defeatist and cynical claims of the Return To Order, is the title of one image that represents the aftermath of a devastating storm. Imploded homes, family photographs askew on the walls, pianos and knick-knacks upturned, compose a ravaged landscape. One can see on close inspection that the people in the pictures within the picture are both total strangers and familiar icons.

The Fights, an ongoing series of graphite and ink drawings feature boxers in mid-match. The dripping red gloves and exquisitely detailed and alternately abstracted bodies are imbued with a distinct kinetic energy. The power of each blow and its impact is highly articulated and felt. Here the entwined Apollo-esque bodies perform their masculinity. Smooth Girls and Roses embed the fantasy girls of magazines like XXL and King into vintage prints of roses and minutely cut and patterned lace-like paper to create ultra feminine collages. The appropriated girls weave in and out of the hand made element, body parts cascading over edges and punching through slits and holes. The telescoping perspective of the figures mimics techniques Milan conjures in his drawings, again highlighting a kind of see saw motion within the static image that makes tangible the tension in all his works.

The invitation for Milan’s show is a self-portrait, made as a kind of homage to and imitation of the portraits in Robert Mapplethorpe’s Black Book. This piece could be considered part of his exhibition, a clue to the artist’s shifty position on reading, or the practice of creating lines of definition and difference that fix things exactly in one place.