This Week is Your Last Chance to See Vibrant The Whale Exhibit in Fort Worth

It takes cojones for a contemporary artist to look at decades of paintings and decide they have something to add to the conversation. However, with The Whale, Venezuelan-American artist Alex Da Corte's first survey at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, twists and (literally) flips some of the museum's most iconic pieces sideways with aplomb.

Having visited the Modern for the first time in the late 2000s, Da Corte (then working for a plaster company to fund his art school education), couldn't help but be swept away by the work of Roy Lichtenstein, Frank Stella and Andy Warhol. These artists — and many more — remained important influences when he finally undertook his "Jungian sea journey" to create his own exploration of what painting meant to him.

"The Whale was born out of this theory that essentially proposes that, to truly become new, one must go through the process of something that feels like being consumed by a whale," Da Corte explains. "Life is diving all the way in and submerging yourself in all of its rich experiences. When you come out of The Whale, you are a different person. That immersion and release is quite radical and righteous, but holy. In a proposal for a survey show, the hope for myself and viewers is that we leave in a new place and I'm right there with everybody trying to figure it out."

The Whale showcase, organized by the Modern and curator Alison Hearst, manages to be both reverent and subversive in its reimagining of some very familiar works.

The show opens with a gallery devoted to some of the museum’s greatest hits, juxtaposed with Da Corte's twists and references on his chosen classics. The artist's note-perfect rendition of Warhol's “Marilyn” is flipped in a mirror image. Da Corte’s “Siren” (a digital print on plexiglass of Janet Jackson's smile) recalls the color blocking of an Ellsworth Kelly painting.

"So much of my work is a replica," Da Corte explains. "It's thinking about the things of culture, the things of history and what it means to twist them a little bit or reexamine them. Situating my work next to work from other artists I have replicated made sense — to make those who have familiarity to the collection as it stood slow down, and say, 'Maybe what I thought this work about is slightly different. Maybe I haven't always been looking at things the way that I could.'"

The Whale is perhaps most notable for its effervescent mix of high and low culture, which comes to the fore in a room of reverse glass paintings that draw from the covers of news magazines, CDs and cartoons.

"It's a way to connect those dots and introduce in a transparent way where some of these works come from, so you, too, can engage with these paintings in a fresh way," Da Corte says. "It's everything from a drawing I made when I was 14 to things I've collected because of their texture or the image or the language in it, like a Newsweek I held onto for almost 20 years from when the Pope died.”

Complemented by glass cases that hold ephemera drawn from Da Corte's flat files, this display offers a rare opportunity to glimpse into the inner workings of an artist's mind in its multi-influenced glory.

“These are things that always kind of intrigued me,” he says. “So I keep them as a flat file in my studio — just things that make me wonder about the world or bring questions to my mind."

Da Corte is aware that he’s “very serious about humor," and the straight-out-of-Looney Tunes aspect of his Claes Oldenburg-inspired padded neoprene and foam works supports this underlying whimsy. Unsurprisingly for an artist who initially intended to become a Disney animator, a cartoon anvil beckons you into rooms full of color and vibrancy. Dual Mickey Mouse gloves play a giant piccolo carrot, while a jack-o-lantern seemingly "explodes" into pieces across the wall. This is but one reference to Halloween made by the artist, who also crafted a multi-media homage to the Wicked Witch of the West. Similarly, his dual collages reference Michelangelo's Last Judgment in the guise of cheap couple's costumes of bacon and eggs, and peanut butter and jelly (a quirky nod to his Catholic upbringing).

"I look to Halloween not only for its fun and the joy of wearing a costume, but also as a kind of insight into culture where people don these masks and release themselves from a typical space they might be in their normative lives to become something different or scary," Da Corte says. "It's become an outlet for a certain kind of revision of what is normal."

Revision of this so-called "normal" has driven Da Corte throughout his career. Though he has stated the feeling of paint on canvas “sickens” him, he has nonetheless created a reverential temple to the form with unconventional materials, wide-ranging influences and adventurous techniques. And if, upon exiting The Whale, one leaves with more questions than answers, well, that's just fine by him.

"I think when you change your approach to making something drastically, visually or texturally different with every project, object or painting, it can sometimes be read as confusion or erratic," Da Corte says. "But there's a visual thread linking all of this, and it doesn't have to be understood right away. I don't always understand the things that I make, that's why I make them, because none of these things are answers — they're propositions of the world we live in and how we're living in it."

The Whale is included with the museum's general admission tickets.