Jake Troyli’s ‘Fine Line,’ at Project for Empty Space, is full of both humor and paranoia

This mural anchors Jake Troyli’s “Fine Line” exhibition at Project for Empty Space in Newark.

Jake Troyli’s grand amalgamation of pen strokes and photographs is now on view in the heart of Newark. And his massive new mural feels more like a cartoon version of Hudson County in capitalist overdrive. We believe we are looking at Jersey City because of the proximity of the Manhattan skyline: It lurks in the background, on the far side of a Hudson River that rolls straight to the edge of an inhabited zone. Troyli’s waterfront is wrapped in cement, checkerboard linoleum, and the parquet of basketball courts.

This work is part of Jake Troyli’s “Fine Line” exhibition.

Rooms are for lease in the towers, but there are plenty of occupants in there already — including painters, voyeurs, prisoners, policemen and murderers — and nervous eyes peering out from the dark. Assisted by a crane, one man dunks a basketball while a hand extends from a breach in the brickface and draws a three-point arc on the ground.

Though everything looks as sturdy as dry concrete, there are sinkholes in the sidewalk. At least one of Troyli’s inhabitants has tumbled in. All we see of him is one flailing, disappearing leg.

How do we know the victim of this porous pavement is male? We don’t, exactly, but it seems safe to hazard a guess that he is. Almost all of the human figures in “Fine Line,” an exhibition of the artist’s pen and ink drawings at Newark’s Project for Empty Space, look alike.

To be more exact, they all look like cartoon versions of Jake Troyli. They are young men of color with large Afros, thin mustaches, angled eyebrows and wary facial expressions. When they are dressed, they can be natty in crisp suits or official uniforms. But usually, their clothes are off, and their rubbery limbs, bushy tufts of underarm hair and peach-round buttocks are exposed to the day. Not to the street, though: Even when otherwise nude, Troyli’s avatar sports athletic socks and a pair of slides branded with the Nike swoosh.

Troyli’s protagonist stars in a series of small frames that hover on the walls of the gallery and add dimensions to the character. Each of these pieces is incisive, shrewd and impressively paranoid.

This work is part of Jake Troyli’s “Fine Line” exhibition.

In one, the Troyli-man crouches atop a narrow, flat-topped column of rock barely big enough to contain him. He’s got nothing to keep him company but a single scrubby flower. His arms, legs, and fingers are dangerously thin, and are drawn by Troyli to reinforce the verticality and the fragility of the image. Pointedly, half of the Afro — a furious thatch of wrist-twisting curls that looks like it must have been a blast to draw — and the bottom of the column are both cut off. We can’t tell where in space this character is, or how far he has to fall, but it’s pretty obvious that he is in trouble.

In an adjacent gallery, the character has the opposite problem. Troyli depicts him emerging from a farm plot like a root vegetable, eyes wide and earlobe sporting a stud but nostrils and mouth submerged beneath the dirt. His cylindrical Afro reaches to the sky, but a pair of hands with garden shears threatens to slice it in half. (Another, slightly more helpful, wags a watering can in his direction.) Once again, Troyli-man is constrained, beset by forces more powerful than he is, and stuck with no latitude for action or routes of escape.

The liveliness with which the artist commits his fine lines to the page, the exaggerated facial expressions and postures, and the absurdity of the predicaments make these pieces comic. But the themes, emotions and implications are dead serious.

In the American funny pages, there is a long tradition of mixing whimsical, energetically drawn pictures with social commentary. At times, it has paralleled the main line of high art. Certain figures, like the masterful painter Lyonel Feininger, crossed over from the Sunday papers to the museum galleries with little friction.

Even the crisply rendered canvases that Troyli is best known for betray a clear debt to those newspaper and magazine cartoonists whose ambitions transcended the confines of the strip. When he has a pen in hand, he is a rogue satirist in search of syndication. The grand mural that anchors “Fine Line” feels like the result of assigning the design of the ceiling of a Renaissance chapel to the staff at Mad magazine. Veteran subscribers may even expect the wall to fold in.

Yet as much as Troyli may owe to Mad veterans Al Jaffee and Sergio Aragonés, the cartoonist whom Troyli recalls the most is B. Kliban, the terror of the mid-’70s whose off-the-wall body humor and vicious digs at human pretensions and social relations enlivened the pages of Playboy. Kliban trafficked in absurdity but always found a way to direct his nonsense against the authorities. No matter how silly his cartooning got, there was never any doubt that he had it in for the establishment.

This work is part of Jake Troyli’s “Fine Line” exhibition.

A similar kind of impatience operates in Troyli’s work. All of his jokes are thoroughly barbed. His characters are in perpetual danger, even if they aren’t always on the ropes. In one piece, Troyli-man plays the self-absorbed politician, nude at the podium with a nipple and belly button showing, and clutching a campaign flag with his likeness on it. Behind his back, he shakes hands with a trio of unseen benefactors. Notably, we only see the speaker’s hungry leer. His eyes are mercilessly shorn from the frame.

If the protagonist can’t, or won’t, cut deals with the controllers behind the scenes, the authorities have other manipulative strategies. The show’s most disturbing piece (and maybe its most memorable, too) shows a pale-skinned figure behind a mask in the likeness of Troyli’s main character. The impostor wears Troyli’s skin close to his own, and hovers one long, probing finger over a large button. We don’t know what’s about to be triggered, but it certainly feels consequential. A young man of color is about to get blamed for a choice that an older white person makes.

The executive in the Troyli-man mask returns in the wall mural at the center of the show, riding a wrecking ball into the side of an inhabited brick building. He is doing the work of the developers, who have turned this chaotic waterfront cityscape into a place of speculation, and never mind the people who have to live here.

Yet for one Troyli character, at least, the battering ram may come as deliverance. In a high window of the tower marked for destruction, a pair of hands are raised to ward off the downward strokes of a slasher with a knife. Chances are, both attacker and victim are about to be buried alive in the same heap of brick and concrete. But ironically, because of the disruption, the mark has a chance of survival. It is a slim one, sure, just as the pursued man on the column of earth is unlikely to get out of his predicament intact. Nevertheless, Troyli knows what Kliban and the artists of Mad knew: Upheaval means possibility. Most of those possibilities are bad. But when you’ve got nowhere to go but up, you might as well let that wrecking ball swing.

“Jake Troyli: Fine Line” will be at Project for Empty Space in Newark through Jan. 18; visit projectforemptyspace.org.

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