Welcome to Planet Spitzer, a world turned inside out, a glimpse at the great mystery within. Only the most intrepid will recognize the terrain.

Here, instead of natural light, there’s the suggestion of smoldering slag heaps and coke-choked skies. Here, bridges span whirlpools that threaten to drain their paintings dry. And here, industrial and anatomical images collide, trade places, coalesce. Shapes tumble into an abstract and then familiar geometry that compresses space and creates cities from shards of smashed stained glass.

In each of us there exists a world like the one revealed here. A labyrinth populated by vestigial fears, by grotesque and visceral disorder and by lurid visions in riotous colors that are alternately amusing and abhorrent.

Jim Spitzer has journeyed to this very personal place, not so that you don’t have to, but because he must. His studio hemorrhages with souvenirs from his frequent travels to the world within. His acrylic paintings are forested with trees that resemble bruised flesh tightly trussed with butcher’s string. Gum-drop colored galaxies filled with nightmares spew from cannon barrels pink as bowels. Nipples suppurate like sores. Mouths moan from lips shaped like cheap, red plastic coin purses.

In self portraits alternately droll and painfully revealing, Spitzer’s eyes sink beneath dark lids heavy from having seen too much. His figures, entrapped in tubes or lost in the blind alleys of yet another maze are, at bottom, remorselessly alone. Ultimately, he makes us see—no, he helps us find—balance and beauty in the seething chaos of the subconscious, and we exist with this understanding: it’s a jungle in there. We need one another…and a sense of humor…to survive.

~Shawn Hart