Charles Yuen’s studio time is a friendly civil war between old comrades of the painter’s trade, figuration and abstraction. Sometimes –often– for Yuen to abstract is to decapitate. Minus head the former figure terminates in a swirling of color. Or, other way around, the head, minus figure, swirls in a field of sine waves emanating from beyond the canvas and wobbling left to right, right to left across its surface. These latter are a frequently used sign of Yuen’s, to let us know that the rendered figures, plus his own thematic interests and musings, will be kidnapped by some narrative of science or science fiction. The sine waves themselves are merely one member of a vocabulary of images on loan from astronomy, zoology, geology, anthropology and psychology or from the fictional siblings of any of those disciplines.

In Rainbow Orbit one of Yuen’s many excursions to outer space, a black Saturn drifts in the orbit of stunted planetary twins. The background to all being a ‘space’ of smeared local incident where the mission of any kind of science is derailed by the painter’s pleasure at his task. And then one of those decapitated moments surprises, as an upside down head (Major Tom perhaps), glides in from the painting’s south.

Science and its fictional consorts are throughout the work a lovingly hand-painted affair. And while the apparance of the means besots the viewer an alarming and probably post-apocalyptic atmosphere invades the scene. Green snow recurs, speckling from one painting to the next. Tear-sheets of scientific images applied directly to the canvas give showers of bombs. Planetary orbits tack wildly out of whack. There is a thickening and thinning of human and social frailty as Yuen’s feigned naiveté gobbles up the canvas like a quietly angry Pac-man. Science, it seems, is politics is culture is military-industry. Where at, we have Yuen, as diarist of Capital’s collapse (or victory, not sure which yet) sending us Fat Man with a bomb-engorged central figure facing off against a couple walking straight out of a Fragonard doodle toward their day job in the factory. (Phew!)

With Natural Enhancement North and South reverse via de-limbing of humans and faux limbs for faux trees. In this way anatomy lessons become unlearned and bodies are undone. The painted rectangle cannot quite hold the organization of the body provoking, perhaps, a dire proprioceptive crisis for the viewer. Legs lost, heads adrift, eyes and ears as weirdly colored implants, Yuen’s population of dysmorphic bodies abrades the reassuring destination of science.

As luck would have it, not all is science. There is ‘finance’ too.  Green blobs of snow moonlight as the stuff of greenbacks in Making Money, a painting where bankers, in lieu of losing their shirts –that was the rest of us– have lost their pants. Not exactly decapitated, not exactly in crisis over what they did, the bankers stand, underpants at the ready, circling the wagons knowing that their life world will survive. After all losing your pants is one thing, losing your head another.

More images of Yuen’s work can be seen at http://charlesyuenarts.com/index.html

And http://re-title.com/artists/charles-yuen.asp.