There is a somewhat desolate feeling to the block of 29^th Street that Fred Torres Collaborations calls home. Stepping off the dusty street, full of as many auto body shops as galleries, I felt both expectant and uneasy. This feeling only increased when I stepped into “Tall Tales” an exhibition of new drawings by Kristofer Porter and Christopher Davison. It is clear from the outset that both artists are incredible draftsmen. There is a shared sensibility, which looms thick and dark in the white walled gallery. Porter’s nightmarish cartoons are as expressive as they are surreal. Lost souls jostle and cling to one another fixed somewhere between terror and delight. Davison’s work is a study in psychic tension, where mythic archetypes rain supreme. The mystical thrust of his diminutive drawings and collages is staggering.

What unites these two artists is not a shared aesthetic but a kind of spiritual storm and stress. The framed works in gauche and ink seem to yell across the room at each other. Both artists are plumbing the same depths, and seem to draw from it a communal language.

Davison and Porter have explored this dialogue in a very literal way. The project is titled “Call and Response” and takes up two walls of a room in the back of the gallery. The rules of the game are simple: “each player has 24 hours from the time of completion of the previous player’s drawing to respond with a 30 min drawing. The response to the previous drawing — whether thematic, structural, or compositional (simply using the same color is not acceptable) — must be immediately obvious to the other player.”

The resulting display of images is both masterful and crushing. This show is a must see before it closes in November.

All images courtesy of Fred Torres Collaborations