“The first time I visited Tabboo!, he had green walls with orange details painted on and a big red couch, like from the punk days. A lot of Tabboo!’s esthetic comes from ‘the punk days,’ as he calls them. Most recently, he had painted a wall day-glo orange with a kind of stucco effect, gotten rid of the couch, and filled the place with odd figurines — an elf, a black model, a pipe-smoking Shango.

When he paints them, they cease being figurines and become figures. They become lifelike. In Chocolate Kiss, one of Tabboo!’s most luscious new paintings, the tiny doll becomes a beautiful black woman, the chocolate brown matched by an equally cool aqua. In Grass, the fairy is sitting on a toadstool, androgynous, with eye make-up, lashes. The elf becomes a surreal, tiny, harbinger of a complicated fate."