It's important not to overthink "The Geshe Gorilla Drawings," the new and, sadly, short exhibit by Marco Badot, because you lose the whimsy, the playfulness, the nostalgia of the work, which looks and feels like comic book art, and, perhaps, could, or should, be. It's also important not to take the artist at his word when he's explaining the genesis of the series, suggesting, essentially, the work is little more than monkeyshines, fleeting, inconsequential, that it's just what comes out these days and, instead of relegating it to some dark corner somewhere and being somewhat embarrassed by it, he simply decided to embrace his inner monkey and show the work. While there may be some truth in that self-observation — the Belgian-born Badot trained at Ecole nationale supérieure des arts visuels de La Cambre, one of Belgium’s leading art schools, after all — there’s nothing revolutional or earth-shattering going on in the exhibit, just a gorilla trying to get by in a complicated inner and outer world, this is more than just empty calories. It's playful, it's fun, it’s nostalgic, recalling youth and comic books, but, at the same time deals with the big three: sex, death and what the artist calls “our apeness,” our basic animal nature, which we all like to believe we have transcended, but, as we are reminded every day, have not and cannot.
