For most people, warm-blooded animals have the wide eyes and precious smile of a child. In cartoons and fables, they display the warmth and vulnerability, the trickery and genius, of adults.
Fish look familiar, too, but also repellant.
Meeting their eyes feels like a dead-fish handshake. With a technique rarely matched in art today, not even outside video, Viola searches nature in hope of finding his humanity. What he finds instead are cold comfort and a cartoon of childhood. In the open-air markets of Chinatown, just blocks from SoHo galleries, the freshest of the day's catch looks painfully exposed and yet remote. Magic realism has nothing on this one.