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New York Magazine, November 1987

Long known for her small, thorny “cartoon” sequences in which figures in cryptic poses say startling things. Ida Applebroog has lately come into her own as a forceful painter. The works in this breakthrough show are built out of joined panels, multiplying the power of her halting and allusive narratives. There are cartoon sequences, but there are also single figures “drawn” in transparent oil medium to resemble the synthetic rubber Rhoplex she once used. The stories her characters tell now rebound off each other, without resolution, adding a haunting sense of incompletion and disaffection to the broader mood of disquiet.

It’s a look that David Salle would admire, if he were seriously trying to communicate. These paintings of the dark side are simultaneously witty, horrific, disturbing, comic, perverse, sensible, entertaining, and apocalyptic. Casting an eerie light on civilization’s follies, they find a match of style and substance as affecting in their own way as Leon Golub’s. Applebroog’s discontents are aimed at the violence (sexual and otherwise) in the human heart, a subject that should give her enough material for a lifetime. (Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, 31 Mercer Street; through November 14.)

KAY LARSON