http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/19/arts/design/sean-landers-north-american-mammals.html 2014-12-19 01:25:31 Sean Landers: ‘North American Mammals’ “North American Animals,” at Petzel, features paintings of plaid-patterned creatures and trompe l’oeil bookshelves. === Walking into Sean Landers’s In fact, Mr. Landers’s signature monologues are still there, embedded deep in the backgrounds of his animal paintings or hidden in the book spines of the library canvases (bodies of work linked, upon closer inspection, by subtle visual and textual clues). They’re also in the titles; the image of a jaguar sipping from a stream, for instance, is called “The Urgent Necessity of Narcissism for the Artistic Mind,” and relates to an inspirational narrative about the artist’s grandmother (an art teacher who “believed she was a great painter and it was just a matter of time before she was discovered and triumphantly recognized.”) The cute tartan-covered creatures, it seems, are not hunting trophies; they’re spirit animals, meant to guide an emotionally vulnerable artist through the sometimes ego-bruising process of making and showing his work. Another possibility, however, is suggested by a final group of paintings based on “Moby-Dick.” Here, in a 28-foot-wide painting of Melville’s white whale and two smaller scenes of wrecked ships on the ocean floor, are darker ruminations on artistic ambition (and, perhaps, a suitably complex literary model for Mr. Landers’s rambling confessionals).