The only safe way to invest in art? Buy what you love. To that end, If I had ten grand burning a hole in my pocket, here’s what I’d buy this week from three exhibitions I saw on the Lower East Side:
LUCIA VIDALES: The Monterrey-based Vidales is going through a bit of a stylistic shift. Her newer paintings take on a spooky-funny air that’s perfect for the season. That’s not to say they don’t work as year-round art. The paintings use traditional methods (oil paint, rabbit glue, and charcoal on linen) to depict quasi-nightmarish bodies and limbs mingling with memento mori and bug eyes, owing as much to Jim Henson as they do Goya. Expert use of color and a honed balance between sinister and humorous keep the works from veering into unseriousness. They’ve sold well already, but the remaining pieces run $4700-$8000.
→ Proxyco (Lower East Side) • 88 Eldridge St • Tue-Fri 11a-5p, Sat 12-6p, through 11/01.
MIKE LEE (above): At first glance, Lee’s greyscale paintings look like black-and-white photorealistic images of the American dream: cars, houses, assorted scenes of domesticity. They give the feel of half-remembered photographs and incomplete excerpts from catalogs and manuals whose visual legibility shatters as you get closer. The more you look, the more of Lee’s allegorical melancholy emerges. The smallest paintings are $5000 and $8000.
→ Half Gallery (Lower East Side) • 235 E 4th St Tue-Sat 12-6p, through 11/01.
JOEL WYLLIE: Wyllie’s gorgeous works on paper demonstrate the artist’s incredible control over his materials. With a couple of exceptions, the drawings are quite small (the largest is around 30 inches). But their contents play with scale in a cinematic way — recalling masters such as HR Giger and Moebius — with haunting depictions from the artist’s imagination that come oh-so-close to looking like real-life objects while simultaneously alien. Color is used sparingly, but where it’s employed, it glows amongst the graphite and rose-colored pencil figures. Works run $1000-$7000. –Charlie Davidson
→ Foreign & Domestic (Lower East Side) • 24 Rutgers St • Wed-Sun 12-6p, through 11/09.