Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, July 2, 1995 TAG: 9506300014
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 11 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: NICOLE WINFIELD ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: MIAMI LENGTH: Long
Young, hip and fresh out of art school, Scharf went from East Village obscurity to Madison Avenue celebrity almost overnight with his wacky cartoon-inspired paintings.
The hype didn't last. By the end of the decade, the art world crashed, Scharf was trashed and AIDS had claimed his best friend, Keith Haring. Labeled a fleeting fad by critics, Scharf left New York with his family, moved to Miami and regrouped.
Now, with his first solo show in a U.S. museum, a retrospective at the Museum of Art in Fort Lauderdale, a collection of new works at his longtime New York gallery and two museum shows slated for 1996, Scharf is getting a second wind.
``I haven't felt these kinds of feelings since the '80s,'' Scharf said recently from his sun-filled studio. ``I think I'm returning to a lot of the joy - a lot of the early, unbridled joy - and embracing that.''
There certainly was a lot of joy back then.
``He was one of the big incandescent stars of the '80s,'' said Eric Gibson, executive editor of ARTnews, which devoted a 10-page spread to the young Scharf in 1985. ``He sort of personified the '80s train of art that was very illustrative, very rooted in pop culture sources. But he really dropped out of sight towards the end of the '80s.''
Scharf had retreated from the criticism - a victim of both the stock market-induced art world bust that no longer tolerated the $100,000 pricetags for his paintings and what his mentor and idol Andy Warhol might have called the end of his 15 minutes of fame.
``Whenever the media takes somebody, or a movement, and adores it, of course they've got to trash it four years later, because that's the cycle of things,'' Scharf says now.
``Well, I think the cycle is coming back. They've trashed me long enough. Now I think I'm going to get a little bit of ...'' He catches himself and laughs. ``Respect,'' he whispers, smiling, realizing the silliness of his own cliche.
These days, Scharf is reveling in silliness - the sort of fun and frivolity that defined the art world in the early 1980s and his early pop-surrealist works. Products of his television-intensive childhood in Los Angeles in the 1960s, the paintings pitted Elroy Jetson in Fred Flintstone's world, and vice-versa.
Now 36, Scharf swims every day in the ocean, tends to his garden, plays with his two young daughters and paints.
With his wife, Tereza, he also is tending to a new venture, the ``Scharf Schop,'' a South Beach boutique that sells everything from a $2,000 Scharf Jewel, a small egg-like acrylic, to a $12 set of refrigerator magnets featuring some of Scharf's weirder creatures.
He's set to open a ``Scharf Schak,'' a newsstand selling Scharf-ish T-shirts, magnets and computer mouse pads, in New York's SoHo, not far from Keith Haring's ``Pop Shop,'' which obviously served as an early inspiration.
The two artists, roommates in 1980-81, shared a similar philosophy of art for everyone, not just the collectors. Commercial ventures were a natural outgrowth, Scharf explains.
``It was the glue that kept us friends,'' he says.
While the philosophical glue is still there, Haring, known for his graffiti-style ``radioactive'' figures that graced city billboards and subway cars, is not.
His death from AIDS in 1990, coupled with the death two years earlier of 27-year-old Jean-Michel Basquiat, the third member of the original East Village art trio, cast a cloud over the optimism so evident in Scharf's early paintings.
``It's strange to feel like you're the only one left,'' Scharf says. ``It had a big impact on me. And for a while, I think I was more serious. I still am serious, but the paintings then reflected that.''
Scharf refers to his work in the late '80s and early '90s, which dominate the Fort Lauderdale retrospective, entitled ``Sharf-O-Rama Vision.''
While they certainly don't lack the lunacy of his earliest works, they are, as Scharf readily admits, more preachy.
In ``Junkle,'' Scharf paints overgrown purple plants on silkscreened images of weed killer and newspaper articles that bemoan the loss of the ozone and rain forest. Environmental concerns took over Scharf's work after he bought a home in the rain forests of Brazil and started fund-raising efforts, such as ``Don't Bungle the Jungle.''
Art critic Ken Johnson wrote in a 1988 ``Art in America'' review that such paintings didn't allow Scharf's true talents to shine.
``Scharf may be moving toward a more substantial, grown-up art, but for now he seems to have lost touch with his own most personal imagination,'' he wrote.
Scharf seems to have taken that advice to heart in his newest works. The title of the show at the Tony Shafrazi gallery - ``Full Circle'' - is significant.
``I'm doing myself again, which I guess is OK since it's myself,'' Scharf explains. ``But I'm older now, more mature. The original characters are there, but they're more refined.''
In ``Modernorganica,'' a huge 1995 piece, Scharf fills the canvas with whimsy: light-filled geometric shapes and cloud-like whisps morph into his signature creatures - part Dr. Seuss, Sesame Street and Hanna Barbera. The colors are lighter than his earlier works and the lines are more sure.
Scharf also will show new works at Miami's Center for Fine Arts in January and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Monterrey, Mexico, later in the year.
The ``Full Circle'' show is doing well - so well that someone walked out of the gallery on a recent weekend with ``Scape'' a 24 X 30 acrylic.
``Everyone was all upset about it, but I thought it was great, that someone would risk going to jail for a painting,'' said Greg Calejo, Scharf's manager.
Others, such as S.I. Newhouse and Yoko Ono, have acquired new Scharfs in a more conventional manner. The works are selling for upwards of $50,000.
Scharf's dealer, Tony Schafrazi, said the new works, coupled with the improving economy and recent success of the New York art auctions, show an optimism the art world hasn't seen for a decade.
``The air of cynicism and negative social concerns from the late '80s are sort of fading away,'' Schafrazi said. ``It's up to the artists to pave the way again. Kenny is doing that. His time has come.''
by CNB