After a series of flower paintings in which Gregory Forstner confronted his practice to the tradition of vanity in art, his most recent works, mostly inspired by playing cards around the time of the French Revolution, features anthropomorphic dogs sporting the trappings of power. Voluntary mistaking the role of the artist by the jester in the court, Gregory Forstner stages newly grotesque figures in the custom of Aesop’s Fables and, with corrosive humor, questions today’s social pheno- mena and human sensibilities in which human comedy plays out. For the viewer, these paintings represent an aesthetic challenge that is both clever and joyful with the awareness of a reality which they unfold that is beyond what may be conceivable outside painting itself.