Eccentrically naïve momma's boy, late blooming painter Henri Rousseau, was our fin de siecle artist-odd ball. He was obsessed with rendering peaceable beasts lounging around in lush, elegant but made-up junglescapes. Nope, he never stepped on a blade of grass not grown in France, let alone took a swampy ride down an African river. But he looked at a lot of picture books, and hung out in the Jardin des Plants in Paris, and studied the frozen gazes of taxidermied glass-eyed beasts.

Here we are in Culver City, over a hundred years later, before a body of work that could be called Rousseau Nouveau, or let's call it Turbo-Rousseau. It's the new work of painter Natalia Fabia and her show at Corey Helford Gallery called "Hooker Safari: A Glamorous Jungle Pageant".

Like Rousseau, Fabia's a self-assured painter, in her content if not her rendering ability, but unlike our naïf Rousseau she's brought women so far out of the Garden of Eden that Eve shamelessly eats apples all day, washing them down with a magnum of champagne, and spits back the seeds. And she looks trampy sexy doing it. Fabia's canvases come at us with her unabashed love of glam and glitter. Her subjects are glam-a-zons -- women with healthy manes of hair, curvy bodies bedecked in jewels, fur, tattoos, strappy shifts and thrift store prom gowns. Her actor/models pose in junglescape settings, utterly nonplussed at the roaming beasts that seem to emerge from the same fecund soil. Nothing bothers these women, not the apocalyptic horizon pinkly reflecting off their blue-white perfect skin, nor the zebras, hippos, tigers, iguanas, and occasional raccoon that linger mid-distant. In fact, the beasts and the women show no fear of one another, a vestige here of Eden, pre-bite. But Fabia's Eve couldn't give a rat's ass about the ramifications of sin -- she's got a party to get to!

Though overtly sexualized, Fabia's women come not out of the Marilyn Monroe glam-bot school -- women reflected off men's desires. These women have grown beyond the coquette. What remains is the use of glamour not as a tool, not as sexual lore, but as a form of exuberant self-expression and what it means to be the owner of a set of fabulous breasts. But what's more remarkable about Fabia's women, as an ilk, is that they are so unquestionably confident in their womanhood as to be utterly unrivalrous of one another. What we feel here is a sisterhood between them and Fabia, as the deliverer of them to canvas. And it's a world that comes to us absent of men -- a world that we could call Post-Man -- or let's say, a world where men are besides the point.

But in one particularly hilarious waterscape, we find the only man in the show, doing the only dirty work to be done here: rowing a boat. The work is called "Jungle Cruise Danger Zone." And of course a totally at ease platinum babe is draped across a boat seat, riding in front, wearing what looks like the late Mrs. John F. Kennedy Mr.'s wedding dress famous for its satiny white simplicity and utter lack of doodads. The man and woman gaze into the same but separate future horizons, in what would be a stagy romantic voyage if there were any romance here at all. He looks less like a man a-courting, in his nerdy Barton Finkian scare-do and round black frame glasses, and more like a writer for a show like 'The Office'. So what's he doing in the jungle rowing a boat if his gentle finger tips have only known the touchpads of a Mac? Well, maybe he's giving rowing a whirl since sitting at Starbucks waiting out the writers' strike has already becoming tedious. More curious though is a single narrative clue, in the form of a knife, stuck point-first into the wooden seat between them. Ah! A bit of good-hearted noir, minus the shadowy parts. Is the knife for protection? After all, this is a 'dangerous jungle cruise.' Is it a murder weapon -- are they on the run? Or are they on their way to a planned kill? And what in hell's name is up with the hippopotamuses paddling gently behind them, as would well-trained guard dogs, in their wake? I don't know. I don't care. It's just plain odd, theatrical, and hilarious.

Next we find a more modern influence in the dollfaced gaze of the actor/model in "The Emerald Peafowl Queen". This recalls the set-ups of Cindy Sherman's stylized photo-portraits. The model here is posed to maximize the angles of her shape, frozen as if taxidermied, eye make-up in smudged rivers down porcelain cheeks. Like Sherman's photographs, the design of the scene is so tightly framed and controlled, down to one hand poised impossibly on finger tips.

Then there is the brunette lying in a black negligee on her back, in grasses, entitled "Noctornal Silk Trap," eyes set in the glassy death-stare of murdered femmes on a pulp novel cover. But dead or alive is beside the point. She is so glam-sexy in her apple red perfectly applied lipstick!

And in a show that includes in its titling the words 'glamorous' and 'pageant', what else can we expect? Nothing less than glitter! And with the application of glitter to her art, Fabia unselfconsciously blings up her carefully rendered canvases with the silliest of craft goods, as if to say: I spent three painstaking months rendering this perfectly -- but hell, bring on the glue and glitter! We see this example in blood from the mouth of a tiger, in an animal portrait, covered in red glitter. One might take pause and ask: This glitter business, this blingification, does it make Fabia less of a serious artist? After all, glitter is the most ubiquitously common of crafts! But it's this final frivolity, this sprinkling of craft store's most common good on art so exactingly rendered that makes the work ballsy -- an artist working in total who-cares confidence. And so, what would a post-glam world look like? Hmm. I know I'd like to see a few wall-sized pieces, I mean big, out of ye olde genre school of painting. Glam-i-size it, is what I mean to say, or, work biblically epic -- minus the bible part with, of course, sparkles. 

NATALIA FABIA: "Hooker Safari: A Glamorous Jungle Pageant" on view November 10-December 3, 2007. Corey Helford Gallery, 8522 Washington Blvd., Culver City, CA. 310.287.2340; http://www.coreyhelfordgallery.com

PHOTOS by Angelique Groh compliments of the gallery.