NORTH ADAMS, Mass. — A group of 16 kindergartners on a tour of the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art here stumbled upon a gallery last week where a show was being installed and the children halted in their tracks.
“Look!” said one boy, pointing across a room made eerie by blue and red neon. “Real water! Real ducks!” The water was indeed real, in a shallow white pond where the light made it look like strawberry milk. The ducks were actually swans, motorized plastic ones, circling one another in the water with fake candles rising from their backs.
If the scene felt like a contemporary-art remake of “Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory,” its creator, the Philadelphia artist Alex Da Corte, didn’t look the part of that top-hatted pied piper. A boyish 35, he was dressed that morning in a threadbare T-shirt and a crumpled Lacoste cap that had been worn nearly to death. He was walking in his socks through galleries where he and a band of devoted friends and assistants had been working for weeks to perfect thousands of tiny details for the most ambitious show of his career, “Free Roses,” which just went on view and continues through January.
The immersive world the exhibition creates can seem Wonka-ish, candy-colored and animated, with deranged elements like mirror-striped floors, flying bats, plastic fruits and vegetables, a giant hoagie made of rubber, and a sculptural rendition of the couch in “The Simpsons.” But Mr. Da Corte, who has become highly sought-after in recent years for a riotous post-post-Pop sensibility, significantly darkens the picture around the corner from the romantic swans, where a video shows a man (Mr. Da Corte’s boyfriend at the time) shooting a syringe-full of Coca-Cola into his arm, drawn from a plastic liter bottle, in a work inspired by Rimbaud’s “A Season in Hell.”
As he once described it, his goal is to challenge the “rules that we have for what is beauty or what is optimism,” moving beyond kitsch and Pop irony into a kind of late-capitalist sublime that can be ravishing and terrifying at the same time.
“If taste is the thing that guides you,” Mr. Da Corte (pronounced da-COR-tah) said in an interview during an installation break, “then how can you step outside that and try to look at everything every day as if it’s new? To live somewhere up here?” He made a gesture with both hands to the space above his head, and added: “I always like to hope that I have no taste, which is not the same thing as tastelessness.”
Mr. Da Corte’s art-world reputation as something of a gleefully sinister provocateur is belied in person; he is affable, humble and speaks with great clarity about the art-historical underpinnings of his work. He grew up around Philadelphia in a large, extended, close-knit family and spent several years as a child in Caracas, Venezuela, where his father was born and raised. The electric colors and material exuberance that have become his trademarks derive partly from that South American heritage. “Piñata parties were real,” he said. “They were a very big deal. And I remember waking up every day and seeing mangoes on the ground, which didn’t happen in Pennsylvania.”
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After attending the School of Visual Arts in New York with thoughts of becoming a Disney animator, and later earning an M.F.A. from Yale, he came to notice in the art world fairly quickly in 2010 with a three-minute video inspired by and set to the 1974 Leonard Cohen song “Chelsea Hotel #2.” Mr. Da Corte made the video shortly after his car, with his computer, clothes and all of his studio notes, had been stolen from a street in New York. Depressed, he returned to Philadelphia and went to one of his favorite no-frills supermarkets, Fine Fare on West Girard Street in the beleaguered Ludlow neighborhood, and loaded a shopping cart, mostly with processed food and plastic.
With a cellphone camera and a white backdrop, he took the things he had bought and in only a few hours made the video, a stark poetic progression in which pairs of dirty hands perform a kind of ballet with the cheapest consumer goods — slicing a piece of bologna in half, stacking white bread, crumpling a plastic happy-face bag attached to a fan, pouring purple dish soap into a neon-green clothes hamper.
“Watching it still kind of breaks my heart, because it makes me think that I wish it could always be that easy,” Mr. Da Corte said, sitting on the ground in the hallucinogenic-patterned gallery where the video runs.
Susan Cross, the curator of visual arts at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, who organized the show there, said that when she first became aware of his work in 2011, that video and other pieces fascinated her because “they were so chaotic and so weird and disorienting, but the more time you spent with them the more you saw how formally rigorous they were.”
Like many artists of his generation, Mr. Da Corte sees his work as something fundamentally unstable, as material to be remixed, like music. The show has borrowed pieces from collectors and recombined them to be, at times, almost unrecognizable.
He also sees the lines between his work and the work of artists he admires as blurry at best. In paintinglike works he makes by sandwiching three-dimensional objects between glass and foam board, he sometimes incorporates pieces by friends, like the painter Sascha Braunig and the sculptor Nancy Lupo. A major work in the show here, the three-hour video “Eastern Sports,” is a collaboration with the artist Jayson Musson (known for his invention of the alter-ego art-world scourge Hennessy Youngman). And last year, at the Luxembourg & Dayan gallery on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, Mr. Da Corte created work with borrowed pieces by blue-chip forefathers of postmodern anxiety like Mike Kelley and Robert Gober. Roberta Smith, in The New York Times, wrote that last year’s show dazzled “at every turn,” weaving “confounding narratives about innocence and decadence, mass production and eccentricity.”
In an era when mass culture can make eccentricity seem like just another efficiently manufactured product, Mr. Da Corte is well aware of the conundrum he and other Pop-focused artists of his generation inhabit. But in a Beckettian “can’t-go-on-I’ll-go-on” way, he also believes beauty and meaning are still possible, if maybe only harder to find and understand.
“I love big-box stores,” he said, inspecting a work composed of tables with surreal, precisely arranged tableaus of big-box flotsam and jetsam, which also appear in his videos. “To me, these things are like meeting your heroes, like meeting the stars in the movies you’ve just seen. They make me happy.”
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