Ali Ha as “Pufferella” and Josh McCutchen at Factory Fresh. — Photo by Paul Cox

Friday night offered, to borrow a well chosen adjective from living-room gallery Centotto’s Paul D’Agostino, a vesperal tour of Bushwick’s art venues – and not the first, as Back the Beat is only the latest in a twice-yearly series orchestrated by Jason Andrew and his Norte Maar.

While the nights cycle in every February and October, Andrew explained when we finally caught up with him at the end of our tour, “the intention isn’t to have a repetitive ‘First Thursdays’ style evening, but to do something special every time. It’s not just about the artists but also the curators, giving them a chance to share what they do and show the art they like." For his part, Andrew is reluctant to play meta-curator and keeps the invitation open to all spaces in the neighborhood. This February the gallery cycle was at neap tide, with six venues joining in to open their doors until 10pm. Compared with last October’s ten-gallery decathlon it made for an easy ramble with plenty of time to linger.

Rewinding to the beginning, we kicked off at the southern outlier Famous Accountants, hosting early-opening banter and the work of Randal Wilcox (on show until Sunday). Wilcox’s watercolor-pencils-and-spit pieces play well to the Accountants’ creed of "gallery as sketchbook," having the feel of classroom scribblings gone out of hand. In the works, Wilcox plants his self portrait in a series of 21st-century paranoid delusions, taking on roles from African warlords to feral newlyweds. It’s a whirlwind tour of the criminals and victims of our times, all with the same face. 

Fifteen blocks up the road and embedded in the depths of 449 Troutman is Sugar, the friendliest little art space on the block. The room is currently (into March) displaying a rich pairing of hypermasculine Americana. David B. Frye’s Sick Semper Tyranus hijacks grand historical painting and sculpture in a single work, offering Abraham Lincoln in all his glory. JJ Sulin’s Fight at Fairmount Park, meanwhile, comprises a more grounded ethnographic photo series of the sport of boffing as discovered in Iowa. The pairing of the two is, we imagine, just the sort of curatorial spark of insight that Andrew would have aimed to showcase tonight. 

Westward to Factory Fresh, who have spared no decoration for a brief one-week show. The front space is turned into a construction paper fairground for gallery co-owner Ali Ha, in the guise of Pufferella, and her sewn canvases. Most of the textile cartoons depict more carnival scenes, which seem to be venues for Craigslist assignations of the strangest sort. The back room was offered on short notice to Josh McCutchen, whose brightly urban paintings range from grotesque caricatures to works that, in the words of the co-owner, "you might actually see on a rich person’s wall." 

There follows a brief, crowded stop at the adamantly Italian Centotto, an apartment gallery helmed by Paul D’Agostino. His between-shows interstizio tonight (and through February) is an off-the-cuff curatorial experiment attempting to make amicable roommates of representational photographs and abstract paintings. It all seems to be going well in the busy room, with Tim Kent’s oil work Palestrina commanding respect, but the dreamlike photos still hold their own.

We penultimately reach English Kills, always good for a party but cocky enough to charge $2 for their Bud. Dominating the walls and the party are monolithic new paintings by Andy Piedilato (to March 21st), which seem to have absorbed something of Bushwick. The solid works turn rolled paint into bricks and pipes, creating very urban gestures of the sort that haunt the dreams of loft dwellers. 

At almost every stop along the way, there has been a certain buzz: there is, according to the whispers, a Rauschenberg in Bushwick. The unlikely appearance, like a Madonna on toast, drew us all eventually to Jason Andrew’s own STOREFRONT. There was indeed a rare, frail early collage from the artist’s Black Mountain College days, on loan from a friend. This served as a companion to new sculpture by Norman Jabaut, like an ancestor’s sepia portrait on the wall. Jabaut’s wall mounted pieces (on display through March) absorb the fabric of Bushwick in a more literal way than Andy Piedilato’s paintings, using evocative wooden detritus from our streets and combining it with Cape Cod flotsam in simple coarse-grained unions of things left behind.