It goes without saying that Jack the Pelican is honored to present the latest and greatest from the renowned David Sandlin.

Who is David Sandlin? --The artist is genuinely too humble to give himself the credit he so hugely deserves...

So I will (or just read his CV)... If you don't know, it probably means you're young and not a student of art history, and it's time to get on board.

David Sandlin has long represented everything that is sacred to the New York artistic underground.

In striking contrast to the infamous 80s artist Chuck Connelly, whose rabid self-destruction led to years of alienation and obscurity until only recently, when the popular HBO artumentary The Art of Failure (yes, that was me) resurrected him as an under-appreciated "rogue genius" (but this was not my point of view)--Sandlin has been riding hard and strong in prestigious venues around the world, his vision steadily building in maturity and ambition.

In 2006, he enjoyed a museum mini-retrospective of his career in his native Ireland; and just earlier this year (2008), he exploded in Los Angeles with a fabled double-solo exhibition at important galleries La Luz de Jesus and Billy Shire Fine Arts.

Sandlin the bad boy grew up in the late 60s dodging bombs in Belfast--only to culture-warp at age fifteen over to bible-belt Alabama of the 1970s. He rose to artworld prominence in the East Village scene of the 1980s--under the auspices of the legendary Gracie Mansion. Artist and gallerist worked together with mutual devotion from 1983 through to his last solo show with her, in 2002, after she relocated to Chelsea (beautifully reviewed by Nancy Princenthal in Art in America—among other publications).

Sandlin's boozy blend of low comics and high art is at once a raunchy satire of American right-wing populism and a sober, provocative and conceptual exploration of cross-genre pollination. The artist has been written about extensively and continually over the years by many in the Who's Who of Art Criticism (if there isn't one, there should be!), and has succeeded even in piercing the wildest imaginations of good liberals everywhere with his comics and books, reviewed widely in prominent publications.

This from The New York Times Book Review , by Stephen Heller, December, 2003:  

Worth noting: the drawings Heller's here referring to are continuous--they work in one long, unending strip. When the book was published, the series—as intended—was incomplete. Sandlin developed them for the purposes of publication as though he were creating a traditional comic--as line work, subsequently scanned and layered over with computer graphics. In a very real sense, the book affords only a partial insight into the work. The "apotheosis" would be his eventual presentation of the finished work, rendered more robustly and sensitively in watercolor. Indeed, this is where you get your Vermeer!

And this fuller work is what we present at Jack the Pelican in Sandlin's first solo exhibition with the gallery: "Sin-a-rama: An Alphabetical Ballad of Carnality." It runs 70 feet, continuously along all four walls of our 'back room;' and is surmounted by a parallel narrative frieze, which the artist has cut out of wood and backlit with the glowing colors of seediness.

A further work, hanging ominously over the entrance to his exhibition, is Sandlin's graphic sexy electric sign, greeting your approach. It beckons, as it warns, with the charm of sin.

On a deeper level, it might read, " Nel mezzo del camin del nostra vita." ("In the middle of the journey of our life." --the first line of Dante's Inferno.)

No pictures here, sorry, if you want to see this magnificent and compelling work, you'll have to come yourself in person to the gallery. We're in Williamsburg, easy to find.