JUNGLE JUNGLE JUNGLE
KENNY SCHARF
SEPTEMBER 4 - OCTOBER 25, 2025
ALMINE RECH
Nederlandse versie
“Could you all turn towards the camera and smile, please?” The photographer from Galerie Almine Rech captures radiant faces, eager to prove what a merry gang has shown up at Kenny Scharf’s new exhibition. I feel slightly let down that she didn’t notice how we’d dressed ourselves in the painting’s very colours, ready, chameleon-like, to climb unnoticed onto the canvas itself. We’d be doing him a favour, breaking apart the predictable recipe of grunge background and graffiti foreground. “We stole from street art,” Kenny Scharf recalls during the artist talk, reminiscing about those years when his friends Basquiat and Haring blazed across New York. Forty years on, he still fills a gallery with ease—cartoonish, liquid figures, dashed down in a hurry (is the NYPD still on your heels, Kenny, four decades later?). I try to imagine what a revelation this graffiti once must have been. But it takes effort, as though wandering through a floor of Catholic devotional art only to find yourself suddenly in a puppet theatre. What sort of machinery has the art-clergy engineered to make these Scharf-paintings possible? “My work is mostly about how nature, which I depict organically, should triumph over the man-made, which I portray as machine-like.” Well, Kenny, I fear the machine has already swallowed you whole—I can hear your voice echoing from inside its belly. I stare, glass-eyed, at your canvases, and through their thick impasto I glimpse the glittering gears of speculative art-trade turning. Perhaps they deserve their own floor above or below devotional art: Got it!-Art. An entire level lined with portraits of collectors, each one hiding a Kenny Scharf deep in their tax-free vaults. And behind the portraits, Scharfs canvases hung like wallpaper. Because as decoration, they’d work marvellously, I think aloud as I spin around the gallery, noticing that each work, despite its loud unruliness, still holds a tight, distinctive palette. No buyer could ever complain: every Scharf will slot neatly into a redesigned interior. They cannot help themselves—they must drag the canvases home. Drag, literally, given their excessive size: down the pavement, the streaming lines trailing, thinning, fraying, until the figures burst into life. The manic energy with which simple Kenny stitches everything together suddenly makes sense, as I watch them distort in the shallow puddle on the street. They devour me. I strip off my clothes, dive headfirst into the puddle, and join nature and machine in their battle against the slavery that took over Kenny Scharf.
Jonas Synnave Apers