DeSe Escobar
ULTIMEYES SS04 YFKE, 2026
Calfskin, Italian leather shearling
and metallic lambskin, wood, and
acrylic leather paint
66 1/4 x 60 1/2 x 6 inches
courtesy of artists and Lomex Las Vegas
text by Max Kopelowicz
The glitz, kitsch, doom and sagging va-voom of Sin City is on full display at Sophisticated Boom Boom, Joseph Gaegan and DeSe Escobar’s show on view at Lomex Las Vegas. Situated on a golf course in the Paradise Palms neighborhood, an infamous enclave for entertainers and mobsters alike, the artists stage their works in the painstakingly restored mid-century residence-turned-gallery. The lime green shag carpeting, pink silk circle beds, and rockwall fireplace facade provide the set and setting for Gaegan’s paintings and Escobar’s sculptural furnishings in a full embrace of Lomex Las Vegas’s escapist ethos.
Gaegan, known for his tableaus depicting recognizable members of LA and NYC social scenes, brings his Ensorian sensibility to the Vegas set. His “Welcome to Fabulous” and “Seven Deuce Off Suit” both channel the grotesquerie and eschatological humor of Christ’s Entry Into Brussels in 1889 wherein the artist composes a cattle call of personalities all vying to be seen even as they blur into the distance. Gaegan features himself prominently at the forefront of “Seven Deuce”, with a mutation of “Welcome To Fabulous” framed behind him, in a sort of reversal of Ensor’s Hitchcockian hiding of Christ. The artist wears a worried expression and purple pinstripe suit while holding the worst possible Hold’Em deal as a black cat looks on, but there’s no other cards visible to show whether it’s a winning or losing hand.
The frames become less crowded with his other offerings including an homage to Bob Fosse’s Sweet Charity entitled “Fun, Laughs, Good Times”, where ten marfanic men pose along a cabaret club’s rail, and “The Royal Hawaiian”, featuring Lomex Las Vegas’s interior designer Carlotta Champagne squatting-in-wait as a young man in Gaultier stripes photographs a decrepit showgirl posed on a naked mattress with other Lynchian figures dotting a stretch of desert. Two of Escobar’s colorfully striped shearling and iron wrought dining chairs (“Minimally Baroque and Ashley” and “Minimally Baroque and MK”) frame “The Royal Hawaiian” in the gallery’s bedroom where, through the glass doors, one can see several of her calfskin and leather painted screens leering around the house and backyard. Inspired by Prada and drag icon Divine, the changing screens invite the viewer to gawk at whoever might be swapping costumes behind them—embracing the never-shy atmosphere of the exhibition.
Sophisticated Boom Boom is the third show at Lomex Las Vegas, the brainchild of art advisor Ralph DeLuca and Tribeca gallerist Alex Shulan, after Heji Shin and Mathieu Malouf’s inaugural NYE blowout and an exhibition of Karen Kilimnik’s models and paintings. Founded with a David Hickey-esque sensibility, the pioneering gallery operates like an HVAC, designed to clear the unctuous air of the culturati seeking the next Marfa or Aspen. What DeLuca and Shulan offer, like Bugsy Siegel’s Flamingo before them, is an alternative oasis amidst the aridity of the art world where artists are free to embrace their kitschy whims and fans can arrive in showgirl costumes, seemingly stepping out from either behind one of Escobar’s screens or Gaegan’s frames. Together they create an atmosphere that harkens back to the halcyon decadences of early art fairs, inviting people from near and far to embrace and indulge in the worlds that artists and gallerists create.
To this effect, the evening became a great Stefan, Bill Hader’s SNL club reviewer, monologue. This opening had everything: a DeLorean parked in the driveway, waif CSM students leaping over the bow tied pool like Nureyev, LA’s nightlife impresarios fresh from last night’s bender wearing odes to Liza and Liberace, and New Yorkers taking turns posing Las Vegas locals in front of the artwork. In summary: pure, unadulterated, seldom-seen, often-nostalgically romanticized fun, and as the troupe banded off to Ichabod’s, a piano bar and restaurant where the spirit of Sinatra is served in chilled glasses, one can feel the promise of the house DeLuca and Shulan built always winning.
Sophisticated Boom Boom is on view by appointment only at Lomex Las Vegas through October 10th.