Kenneth Baker
Saturday, May 6, 2006

"After Life" (2005) is a collage on paper by John Hundt. Photo courtesy of Jack Fischer Gallery

Hundt at Fischer: If Jack Fischer stuck rigidly to his plan to feature "outsider" artists -- the unschooled or mentally impaired -- we would not have seen John Hundt's involving little show of collages at Fischer's gallery.

Hundt has art school training and it shows, not so much in his technique as in the thought behind it.

Hundt's collages seek a place in a long line descended from the early days of Dada and Surrealism. A few of them, such as "After Life" (2005), generate a startling air of anachronism by their weird inconsistencies of descriptive information.

Like his predecessors, Hundt aims at the opposite of design -- at a sense of unconscious order exposed willy-nilly. Small wonder he hits it only some of the time.

John Hundt: Collages. Through May 20.

Jack Fischer Gallery, 49 Geary St., San Francisco. (415) 956-1178

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