No fairy tale is ever worth its weight in pixie dust if it doesn't scare you just a little bit. Mark may not deliver the usual troupes of ogres, trolls and wicked witches, but his Never Never land has that velvet touch of evil none the less. Oddly, this most obvious aspect of Ryden's art is in fact its most subtle as well. We may be well used to seeing skulls and devils in the work of Ryden's contemporaries, but the context here is quite different. Mark Ryden does not celebrate evil, even it's its most campy denatured form. Quite to the contrary, his art-making can be seen as an elaborate charade of avoidance towards life's grimmer realities. His is an utterly pure infantilistic escapism. This is the artist's gaze fixedly upon the sweet and shiny, the idealized and innocent, in deliberate denial of the more explicit alternatives. However, as in any emphatic effort to push the darker dimensions of experience out of sight and mind, in even Ryden's most beautiful paintings something lingers, a shadow that haunts his nostalgia infused picturesque. For this artist, who also seeks to answer in his own way those big questions of life, what this dis-ease may ultimately amount to is an awareness of mortality.