Scott Harbison’s aliens — strange, but also strangely endearing — invade Red Bank gallery

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If visiting spacemen don’t resemble Scott Harbison’s creatures, I suggest we turn their flying saucers around and send them home.

Since 2018, the New Jersey painter has been entertaining us with his images of strange beasts, painted in night-sky black and UFO red, on canvases and panels large and small. His aliens are generally approachable, usually adorable, and unmistakably extraterrestrial. They come bearing ray guns, rectangle-headed robots, and antennas in mid-transmission ringed by radio-wave halos. They conform to the time-honored iconography we all know from science fiction stories.

They also carry bouquets, which are meant for us. In their pleading stares and expectant postures, Harbison has embedded their hope that, on a planet as inhospitable as our earth, they might be welcomed.

Harbison isn’t the sort of artist who demands total immersion from his viewer. See a few of his acrylic-and-oil stick pieces and you will get the picture. But because he understands the drama of a full-scale interplanetary invasion, curator Michael Paris Mazzeo has given Harbison’s space-fellows the run of his Galerie Lucida in Red Bank. All four rooms of the lovely Red Bank art space — plus the main hallway — are currently possessed by alien intelligence. Visiting the gallery feels a little like a trip to the family portrait room on a spaceship.

Though Harbison’s beasts are bug-eyed, swivel-headed and, in many cases, saw-toothed and faintly dangerous, this takeover is the farthest thing from a hostile one. These characters seem to have come across the heavens on a search for love and acceptance, or maybe a nice petting. Harbison’s not-so-subtle suggestion is that the real-life aliens and weirdos in our midst are looking for the same.

“Worry Warts,” by Scott Harbison.

“Recent Sightings,” which will open at Lucida on Sept. 19, is a testament to Harbison’s productivity. Many of these aliens are new arrivals. The raw state of many of the panels that Harbison paints on is a testament to his hyperdrive. The show gives the impression that if there is a blank surface around, Harbison is going to test it out for alien habitation and then, through a few deft strokes of his paintbrush, summon the alien.

Nevertheless, none of these works beg for further amendment. They all feel like complete transmissions: thorough likenesses of imaginary beings that popped into the painter’s head and were then committed to canvas in a playful, unhurried manner.

What are Harbison’s creatures like? Their bodies are bulbous, asymmetrical, extremely elongated at times, but not at all displeasing; their eyes are wide, often crossed, with pupils adrift toward opposite magnetic poles. Some, like the lachrymose blue-nosed beast of “Left Behind” (see above), go on all fours. Bipedal aliens often have scrawny arms, or no visible limbs attached to their upper bodies at all. Their mouths are big trouble, loaded with misaligned teeth or, as in “My Deer,” distinguished by tight-lipped grimaces that push beyond the limits of their faces.

All of them seem to be working through one predicament or another. A few open their jaws wide in the hope that some sustenance might fly by. Others, amid paint backdrops that evoke inner space, try to orient themselves in the strange world they have discovered (i.e., ours).

Most of all, they are nonviolent. They are in Red Bank to communicate, not to conquer. They tend to lead with their heads, leaning forward and keeping their shoulders soft as if they are politely trying to get your attention. (The protagonist of “A Host of Characters,” for instance, has a sealed envelope for a heart.) Their antennae are thin pinky fingers held up to the cosmos and the port-like apertures that help propel them, jetpack-style, through space, are modestly tucked into the folds of their bodies. Their hands are small, and claws are practically nonexistent.

“Three 2s,” by Scott Harbison.

They do, however, get hungry — and seem guilty about it. The more fearsome their choppers are, the more furtive the extraterrestrial is. Even the alligator-faced, six-legged creature that stars in “Was It Something I Said” is awfully sheepish as it prepares to chomp down on something inanimate and orange. In their apologetic relationship to their desires, their curiosity and their occasional confusion, they can be very human.

But just as frequently, they are reminiscent of nonhumans. Harbison’s aliens have some of the physical properties of frogs (“Three 2s”), bulls (“Makes Matters Worse”), anteaters (“Foreteller on the Mountain”), moose (“Design for Living”) and crows (“Emergence”). Then there are the many “Recent Sightings” with canine characteristics — so many that if some wag called Harbison’s solo exhibition a dog show, he wouldn’t be far off the mark.

The four-footed extraterrestrial subject of “Corpuscle,” for instance, has the quizzical look of a collie bewildered by its owner. “Red” is a cosmic guard dog, disinclined to attack, but unwilling as a wall to give ground. The “Scrutinist,” a kind of alien-dachshund hybrid, comes equipped with a space supervisor who looks suspiciously like a fire hydrant.

Sirius is called the Dog Star. The zodiac is a zoo. Human beings have always seen animals in the sky, and Harbison’s union of the extraterrestrial and the earthbound isn’t unique. Yet as earthly as his creatures can seem, there is never any doubt that they are otherworldly. Their antennae, enormous eyes and long “War of the Worlds”-style legs — and the irregular, sawed-off contours of their bodies — mark them as foreigners on earth. Cute they are, but they are never cutesy: Harbison is able to make them endearing without sacrificing any of the things that make them weird and distinctive.

“A Host of Characters,” by Scott Harbison.

We might ask why these guys are trying so hard to ingratiate themselves to us — why, despite their sharp teeth, their extra limbs and their tridents for protection, they have journeyed across the stars with flowers in hand. It may have something to do with Harbison’s desire to please the audience. It may also be because the future isn’t what it used to be. If we are a little more suspicious of robots than we once were, and if science isn’t bringing us the same security that it once did … it is not hard to understand why. Tellingly, the extraterrestrial trappings of Harbison’s beasts are old-fashioned: Jetsons personal spaceships, helmets suitable for Neil Armstrong, biology-class microscopes, androids with boxy bodies vaguely reminiscent of Disney’s Black Hole. This is comfort sci-fi that the artist is tickling us with, and he is doing it at an uncomfortable time in the history of our planet.

The aliens look like they know it. One of the sweetest little creatures in Harbison’s starfleet is Collido, a red rascal with worried eyes in an E.T. head stacked funny on a long, thin neck. A bent antenna pokes at the rim of the space bubble that surrounds his head. Two feeble rings of plasma surround his limbless body. This is all he’s got for protective gear, and you might doubt that it is enough to shield him from whatever space collision he is approaching next. But Harbison calls the painting in which he stars “Welcome Home Collido.”

This spaceman has made it through the cosmic maelstrom with his body — and his individuality — intact. Maybe we will, too.

“Scott Harbison’s Recent Sightings” will be at Galerie Lucida in Red Bank from Sept. 19 to Oct. 18. The opening reception will be at 6 p.m. Sept 19. Visit galerielucida.com.

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