Nicholas Cossitt doesn’t show off. His prints entail intensive processes of etching, aquatint, and drypoint, with the recent addition of monotype, but these all take a back seat to his earnest and sometimes repulsive imagery. The imagery has ranged over the years from biting but affectionate portraits of friends and neighbors to civil war generals, murdered rappers and porn stars. His renderings of these figures is frontal, perhaps confrontational, but neither celebratory nor judgmental.

The carefully modulated values created through the wash-like aquatint and the hatch-marks endemic to etching seem to be the method by which Cossitt meditates on his subjects. He digests them through this labor, but both the process and his own thoughts remain hermetic, and we are left with the empty, opaque surfaces of faces and bodies: a realism that tells us nothing, clarifies nothing, and leaves us to contemplate the cruelty, indifference, and self-serving behavior that is very much in the air these days.

Cossitt’s new show focuses on seedy images of porn, drug use, and less specifiable disasters, such a silhouetted throng running under a boiling red sky in the monotype “Devils are for Real.” He does not adopt a moralizing position in relation to these images, so it would be pointless to attempt to defend him against the charges of misogyny often leveled against the use of the female nude in art. He neither engages in a traditionalist treatment of the nude as the site of ideal beauty, nor in the well-worn strategy of critique-through-excess. In the world of popular media, to which Cossitt’s art is attuned, both genders are plagued by obsessive attraction and bitter resentment towards one another, which could just as easily be outward projections of narcissism and self-loathing.

It seems as if Cossitt is simply making prints of the stuff he gets off on: mushrooms, cannabis, motorcycles, and pictures of pouting nineteen-year olds with frizzed hair and shaved pubes. But in the course of the prolonged getting-off, deferred through the monastic etching process, the artificiality of commodified desire becomes his real subject. This is further emphasized by Cossitt’s awkward drawing, in which figures seem weightless and disconnected, both from their environments and from themselves.

Of course his drawing is anything but inept, but is a carefully keyed manifestation of the broader disconnection between the altruism to which we aspire and our habitual destructive behavior. One or two of the grotesque posturing nudes, as well as a stone-faced self portrait, contain deliberate, but broadly spaced hatchings that merely indicate their intended function of modeling in three dimensions.  Instead of doing their job, these lines tell you what their job would be, if all were well in the universe. Experience is disintegrated into technique, which fails to reveal any comforting secrets. Cossitt’s “failure” is poignant and profound, and every bit a calculated artistic accomplishment.

(Note: No venue is off limits as long as any connections are fully disclosed: so let it be known that this gallery carries my work as well.)

“Devils are Real,” by Nicholas Cossitt is on display at Eric Schindler Gallery, 2305 E. Broad St. through May 8.