Topcat Boy

An early large-scale masterwork, Top Cat Boy bears all the trademark features of Paschke's paintings of the 1970s: vivid colors, application of a variety of media, and subject matter drawn from his fascination and flirtation with life on the social fringe. Top Cat Boy demonstrates Paschke’s delicate approximation of media including photomechanical imagery, silkscreen, and airbrush, while the nearly neon palette is typical of his work from this period. The artist utilized overhead projectors to layer images onto his canvas, which introduced a sophisticated visual and psychological complexity. With its carnivalesque arrangement of colors and narrative ambiguity, the painting, like most of Paschke's greatest works, exists in its own sleazy netherworld, where the fluidity of the figures' racial and gendered identities play out against a neon-lit backdrop of spectacular entertainment and, perhaps, social deviance.

  An earlier variation on the two figures, a photo-realistic painting titled A Colores (1970; location unknown) appears to merge a postcard-like image on the left and two overlapping advertising photographs on the right. In this version, the male figure from Top Cat Boy appears without a mask while the female appears in her original guise as a doll. A photograph of Top Cat Boy in an interim state reveals that Paschke painted the man's face in full prior to painting the mask over it. Top Cat Boy retains the doll-like female form, but replaces the doll's face with a photomechanical image of a woman's face. She stares blankly into the distance, diverting the gazes of onlookers and expressing a detached ennui that contrasts sharply with the man's knowing smile.

  In its subject, Top Cat Boy is a transitional image linking the boxers and wrestlers Paschke painted in 1968–69 and the strippers that would populate his paintings throughout the 1970s. The mask worn by wrestlers in such paintings as Mid American (1969; The Art Institute of Chicago) or Red Ball (1971; private collection) reappears in Top Cat Boy. The man’s oversized hockey gloves, too, recall the wrestlers' hulking forms, yet they also look robotically futuristic. In the fall of 1970, Paschke likely exhibited Top Cat Boy as part of a one-man show that also included paintings of shoes and other leather objects at Chicago's Deson-Zaks Gallery. By then, Paschke had already begun exhibiting with a group of artists known as the Chicago Imagists, whose work was rooted in personal experience but articulated in a syntax drawn from the garish propensities of lowbrow popular culture. As such, Top Cat Boy is an amalgamation of Paschke’s lifelong penchant for sports like wrestling, and for the gritty aspects of urban life.