DISTORT is drawn to reflective surfaces: Some of his painted surfaces positively gleam. The scratched texture evokes emotional distress and the disintegration of identity it also looks cool and imparts instant weathering to small pieces that, unlike his murals, have never felt the sting of Jersey City a winter. The artist applies paint to metal, and he often engraves those sheets with short, straight lines of considerable nervous energy. The other unifying force in “Reaching for the Steal” is DISTORT’s formal experimentation.

He’s painting a world in trouble, one where the power imbalances are massive and things are consequently falling apart and going up in flames. DISTORT’s images may be dreamlike, but the emotional and symbolic logic that underpins his visual syntax is immediately legible. Everything under siege - the city mostly, but the natural world, too - is unnaturally small. Everything threatening - uniformed figures, guns, old-model cars with headlights on - is abnormally large. Or maybe she’s just curious? Either way, the peril is palpable. A woman with a baton is fed into a gleaming industrial drum that glows a toxic-waste green. A great firmament of tombstones rises around the Philadelphia skyline. A banker beneath a sky decorated with ribbons of pipe akin to those in the PATH tubes takes notes dispassionately as the city smokes around him. Proud parents in lurid robes hand a toddler a rifle. Angry-looking eagles hover over the crumpled blades of a crashed helicopter. A child with weeping streaks of black on his cheeks rattles the bars of a cage. The pieces in “Reaching for the Steal” are unified by a prevailing sense of menace: These paintings bear arms. How does DISTORT juggle these elements and harmonize these juxtapositions? Adeptly, it turns out. Plaster arms and legs protruding from brick surfaces are arresting and maybe a little playful, too they also recall Robert Gober’s impish sculptures of distended limbs in strange corners. There is at times a certain medieval flatness to the images. There are subway tunnels that resemble cathedrals attended by monkish figures in classic poses. Almost everything about “Reaching for the Steal” alludes to art history and the artistic canon: I see refractions of the Mexican muralists, film noir, American landscape painting, surrealism, the Italian Renaissance, and much else. As it turns out, he’s less a street artist dragged indoors than he is a traditional painter who shrewdly uses the visual language and energy of graffiti to shake the viewer up and increase his susceptibility to DISTORT’S emotional incursions. He belongs to the city, but he’s also deeply aware of transcultural trends. 1, and you can arrange a visit through the Deep Space website) reveal an artist comfortable working on a smaller scale and speaking person to person. The paintings and sculptures now on view at the gallery (they’ll be there until Nov. But as the “Reaching for the Steal” show at the Deep Space Gallery (77 Cornelison Ave.) demonstrates, there’s more to DISTORT than mere volume and less distortion in the signal he produces than his reputation and his handle indicate. You might conclude that he’s a maximalist, and in a way, you’d be right. DISTORT is not shy about taking up space - his mural by the Holland Tunnel is one of the hugest pieces around. DISTORT is one of the biggest names in Jersey City art, and I mean that literally: If you’ve walked around town, you’ve seen his name painted in big block letters on the many murals he’s contributed to the local streetscape.

Deepspace robert plaster