There are NYC nights and Hollywood Nights, there’s the Jersey shores and a Tequila Sunrise. Jackson Casady suffuses, injects and projects so much color and lushness into his paintings that you can just about feel the warm breezes buffeting your top-down ride. Though a wrong turn could possibly be just around the corner. Walking through Casady’s upcoming solo show, Pecadillo Soup, his debut at Santa Monica’s Richard Heller Gallery opening July 11, is like entering a dark-lit, suspenseful, ride-through amusement park full of fun, pushing the door open to a nightclub populated by dapper and dubious denizens, or stepping through luxurious palm fronds into a pool party. Fool’s dreams, maybe, but we’re victims all. 

 

Casady’s imagination is itself a bubbling cauldron of screenplay and song, sketched out, then transformed in acrylic and oil, and sometimes with a splash of spray paint. Like a funhouse mirror, might just see ourselves in a different way, but life carries on.