By Paul Laster for Time Out New York

Time Out New York / Issue 747 : Jan 21–27, 2010

An accomplished musician and DJ as well as an emerging artist, George Rahme creates mash-up art out of thrift-store versions of Old Masters and other genre scenes, slicing and dicing his found materials, while adding generous dollops of enamel house paint. The result: fascinating new narratives inspired by the decaying cityscape of Detroit, where Rahme lives and works. As the title of his first New York solo show emphasizes, his content is "all there already," but it requires his deft touch to bring it to life.

Cloud Ceiling blends popular subjects, such as Jesus at prayer, women playing classical musical instruments and animals from Edward Hicks's famed Peaceable Kingdom, with pigment poured and pushed around the surface of the canvas, to highlight certain elements. Pink of Condition combines snatches from more than a dozen reproductions—sailing ships, pastoral scenes, Claude Monet's garden at Giverny—with slyly painted passages that poetically connect the disparate parts.

Several smaller works are presented in the decorative frames in which they were found. The Grand Canal shuffles three scenes of Venice, where ships and gondolas are isolated in white paint that resembles mountainous mounds of snow, while Gleam Gleaners uses a single sheet of surrounding gold leaf to transform the bodies of fieldworkers into spiritual sharecroppers. In these pieces, and the 16 other works on view, Rahme employs a DIY, art-history-meets-Goodwill aesthetic in engagingly experimental ways.—Paul Laster