Moving away from his text-based pieces of the late 1990s, in which he presented cartoonish maps and flow charts diagramming various cultural subcultures, Erik Parker has turned to eye-popping color and dizzying details in his recent paintings. “I just like things to be charged and relentless,” he declares. Global (2008–2009) exemplifies the forceful energy of his work. Seemingly in constant motion, the biomorphic head at the center of this painting is composed of a myriad of tiny dots, paisleys, teardrops, squiggles, and drips, in a rainbow of bright colors. Influenced by Picasso and Francis Bacon and their radical manipulations of the human form, Parker’s aim is to test how far he can go in the 21st century in taking the figure to the extremes of alteration.