There may come a point where you find it necessary to employ metaphor and allegory in order to sufficiently express a predetermined human condition.

In this model, a wall of party balloons is both a friendly homage to modernist color-field abstraction and pointillist, pixelated landscape painting, and a send-up of the flaccid conceptualism of the contemporary marketplace. All the works in the show (violently bored carpoolers, disgraced heroes, tragedies reduced to memes) played on this catch-and-release dynamic of palliative discomfiture; but the pair of large-scale, anti-monumental masterpieces "Free love ruined my life" and "Since it all has to end" that anchored the show represented the apotheosis of the jester's courage.

Free love ruined my life.

The latter presents a nearly life-size portrait of a hirsute, bikini-clad man posing like a glamour model by his beloved classic pickup truck under the pageant-style banner "Miss End of the World" and against a backdrop of gauche Op Art patterns. The former is an alarmingly hilarious and inexplicably melancholy take on the historical genre of a regal bloodline chronicle, a crested map of family lineage such as might grace a palace hall. Except, it's all poodles, some with rainbows in their hair. These paintings do it all. They put the viewer (the king?) at ease with permission to laugh at their opening jokes. They soon reveal that their references to the paradigmatic canon of art historical convention are less homage, and more take-down. Their garish palettes and Outsider-inflected techniques turn out to be a deliberate, well-practiced, meticulously rendered vernacular.

Since it all has to end... By the time you realize that you, the viewer, are implicated in the joke -- and maybe even its target -- the truth has already hit its mark. As your laughter morphs into consternation and back again, and you become less certain that rainbow poodles are enough to make you happy in these broken times, that's just the jester -- also known as the artist -- doing his job.