(Art) The Cartoon Hell of Jon MacNair

[image error]

The work of Jon MacNair is best described as “Hieronymus Bosch meets Mickey Mouse” — or more aptly the Fleischer brothers, but I’m not sure how many people know who they were anymore. Surrealist landscapes filled with cartoonish versions of monsters from medieval and renaissance painting, MacNair’s drawings are as eerie as they are whimsical, and by blending high art with commercial, both of eras past, they delight in a kind of fatalist folly, playing on our post-factual suspicion that nothing is real anymore, that the world has turned into a nonsensical and fantastic nightmare from which we must eventually wake, and that we are the perverse creatures in it.