In his first solo New York exhibition, The Only Living Boy in New York (running through January 23 at Sloan Fine Art), Dutch pop-surrealist Chris Berens offers a Hieronymus Bosch meets Mark Ryden-esque vision of chimerical life bubbling up from the whitewashed corpse of a frozen metropolis. With a defamiliarized post-apocalyptic Manhattan as the predominant backdrop, the multifarious creatures and images that people Berens’ interiority are granted free reign to float, morph, and intermingle as they please. Inspired by the dreams that have lived within him since childhood, Berens has worked assiduously over the course of his life to hone his technical skills to the extent that they can capture these visions in totality.

The resulting works appear as if Berens clipped the tethers that keep these soft-focus, protean phantasms safely moored within the confines of his head in order to translate them in full. Disparate incohesive elements and dream-like contradictions in meaning congeal gracefully into meaningful visions – for example, a work entitled Sunset Blvd (above) pictures what appears to be the Flatiron building next to an interior and exterior that simultaneously exist in the same space. Berens maintains that his pieces still do not come close to encapsulating everything that he envisions despite their almost photorealistic detail. Although the works appear digitally or photographically manipulated, Berens creates everything by hand – utilizing a complex and pain-staking process that he himself developed. The resulting pieces are what happens when imagination prevails over materialism and “Manhattan” is joyously overrun by a cavalcade of ball-shaped hybrid creatures that float past like cloud puffs, snow globes, sailing ships, pink balloons, and other special guests.  Click “Read More” for more images.