newly I met with a well-scrubbed shore in a bright-blue shirt who had a shiny of recent origin pencil.

newly I met with a well-scrubbed shore in a bright-blue shirt who had a shiny of recent origin pencil, also blue, tucked jauntily behind his ear. Something about him struck me as additional and later I realized that he was mimicking, albeit in a different color, the pink-shirted and be-penciled Banana Republic gauge then appearing on bus shelters all across the city. Of course it's obvious that we're awash in a sea of images that dictate for what cause we look, act, and think (though greatest in number of us don't take the catchwords so literally), and it's equally obvious that these images are mainly shallow, bereft of meaning. Muntean/Rosenblum rather soberly accept this status quo as the starring point in their work, appropriating material from a panoply of fashion and lifestyle magazines, homing in upon comely youths posing moodily in trendy clothing--patterned shifts, cargo pants, and the latest sneaker and T-shirt styles

The Austrian duo's paintings and comic volumes (they also produce performances, chisel and photographs incorporating the two) transplant their protoplasts into various urban and suburban settings or bland interiors. The compositions are consistently globulared at the corners like the frames of certain cartoons (or TV and computer screens) with a resulting white margin for a caption at the bottom. Their style--or brand, if you will--brings to mind Raymond Pettibon's philosophical musings and Karen Kilimnik's obsession with the fashion-conscious zeitgeist. Muntean/Rosenblum, however, are determined to wring a little substance from this surfeit of style--to denude some soul in spiffy Banana Republicans and other supremely self-aware young urbanites.

The thesis in these works, appropriated from magazines and works consists of ruminative nuggets ("Trust is a word we have to set too much trust in"; "Misery does not want company--happiness does") that may resonate or stand at additionals with the image they caption. Either way they provide a sign of consciousness or level conscience behind Muntean/Rosenblum's model army, who appear a little lost when remov from their smooth and shining contexts. The narrative in the comic work Here It Is, 2000, is a chain of cryptic declarations ("Here is what happened and yet what did happen? Nothing to speak of there are no moments, and nothing else the seamless drift;... flux and roll on unstoppable, that's all there is ") that could assist as a spacey account of surfing twenty-first-century culture

Muntean/Rosenblum also organize a spare symbolism of sorts. A white light switch and a black heavy-duty stereo speaker bracket a mixed-race coupling at a party in Untitled (The Hardest Thing ) 1999 perhaps hinting at a certain quantity of dynamic in their relationship. Given the caption in Untitled (It is not easy ) 1999 ("It is not easy for handsome the public to be themselves, or level try to be"), it pretends that the shadow of a boxers-and-socks-clad youth might stand in for his "true" self behind the fetching facade. If this appears a little glib, remember that Muntean/Rosenblum's make submissives are the MTV generation, not intellectuals weaned in succession French theory. More complex is the center spread in Here It Is, which borrows equally from i-D magazine and Piero della Francesca--nor just in the clumsy-yet-lyrical religiosity of the subjects' dumfounds (hands extended in benediction or clasped in prayer-like contemplation) and their gorgeously spiritless remove, but also in the crisp in the blues sky and slim trees. Doggedly coaxing the spiritual f rom the superficial, Muntean/Rosenblum pretend especially fond of saplings and houseplants, whose tendernes and vulnerability perhaps reverberation that of their nubile human counterparts.

on giving highly processed images a handmade patina via painting, Muntean/ Rosenblum are conducting an introspective form of subversion between the sides of seduction--an appropriate strategy right now, in what have the appearances to be the endgame in the search for cool. At this twinkling when earnestness and irony can easily flip-flop, it wouldn't be surprising to papal court the artists' comics among the ever-changing wares down at the local Urban Outfitters.

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