Rising unmolested from an overcharged and porous subconscious, Daniel Heimbinder’s drawings explore the insecurities faced by this young contemporary artist on the verge of entering the harsh light of critical awareness on the Manhattan art stage. In his New York City debut solo show at Clementine Gallery in January, the artist mines and updates surrealist techniques and imagery by injecting them with a cartoonist’s line and computer animator’s blunt aesthetic sense of color and hard-edge distortion. Setting his bizarre figures with distressed expressions into featureless Dali-esque landscapes, Heimbinder presents allegorical heroes symbolic of his own neurotic sensibility.

His diaristic drawings, done on rich Arches paper with layered washes of brilliant watercolor, are worked up images derived from numerous volumes of sketchbooks to which he contributes obsessively every night. The wonky characters who populate these pages caricature himself and the types of people he has worked with in the New York City art world since arriving here 7 years ago. After his education at the Art Institute of Chicago and Skidmore College, Daniel immediately injected himself into the contemporary art scene, picking up gigs art handling for major galleries and working as a studio assistant for important contemporary artists like Alexis Rockman and David Salle. Years of experience with the kind ripe personalities whose paths he crossed in these capacities have congealed in these nine drawings to form an intriguing community of erratic personalities and nightmarish freaks.

Heimbinder creates humorously cryptic situations where the interactions between the characters are open to interpretation. Like the work of Marcel Dzama, whose drawings are clearly suggestive of narrative but deny the possibility of defining any plot for certain, these horizonless paintings offer oblique criticisms of character types. However, deciphering these criticisms is often as difficult a task as the artist’s process, which he describes as similar to “rattling off 20 words to my psychotherapist over a bunch of months and then trying to analyze the whole paragraph at the end. The struggle to put my imaginings on the page is the kind of difficulty my drawings are meant to address.” Heavily inspired by the comic, apocalyptic and ambiguous drawings of Philip Guston, Heimbinder’s delicate watercolors are frank and disquieting expressions of dysfunctional neuroses. The juxtapositions between the various creatures populating the white pages leave viewers with a sense of stark yet curious disjunction. “It’s like waking up from a nap only to find yourself in Times Square,” explains the artist. Absolutely.