This is heady stuff, not for the faint hearted. Flag draped corpses seemed to be everywhere, along with images of desperate children torn from their mothers’ arms. Frenn’s remarkable draftsmanship and handling of his materials aid his ability to convey emotional and physical pain in a way that is again reminiscent of the Baroque, but also of Surrealism, Goya’s Disasters of War and perhaps most compellingly, of David Alfaro Siquieros’ images of the Mexican revolution and the Spanish Civil war. An interesting comparison in this vein would be with Frenn’s #82 from the group about immigrants, with the double scream of a child based on the horrific images of children being separated from their parents at the border, and Siquieros’ Echo of a Scream (1937, enamel on wood, MoMa, New York).

And there are artists, such as Chawky Frenn, to whom art is a harsh mistress who gives pleasure through both a brutal ability to record the dark footprint of the evil side of mankind, as well as the inherent beauty of the human race. "We the People, for Show or for Sure", is an exhibition full of visually aggressive art. It is perhaps the art show of the year in the entire nation, as 2020 will remain in our memory as a year full of surprises of all flavors, nuances and colors.

You might think it would take a lot to upstage an artist like Damien Hirst, but earlier this year Chawky Frenn did so with ease. A relatively unknown Lebanese painter who works in a decidedly unhip hyperrealist style, Frenn caused a minor ruckus with an exhibition at New Hampshire's Dartmouth College in the United States.

A group of powerfully conceived works by artist Chawky Frenn, now at the Fraser Gallery in Bethesda , is strong stuff -- even for the most seasoned viewer.

MORE SO EVEN THAN his abstract brethren, the representational painter who doesn't bring a healthy dose of self-consciousness to his trade these days runs the risk of being labeled a dinosaur: corny, unhip and irrelevant.

On a bookshelf in his Arlington apartment, painter Chawky Frenn keeps an expansive collection of disembodied baby-doll heads. The weathered porcelain noggins lean on one another in a carefully balanced heap, some of them upside down and eyeless, others staring out at Frenn's studio beneath cracked brows. In their midst, almost too inconspicuous to spot, is a pair of human skulls, one of them not much larger than a baseball.

The Hopkins Center curates new art exhibits all the time, but rarely has one spawned the strong reactions and growing discussion as the paintings of Chawky Frenn shown in the Upper Jewitt Corridor by the Courtyard Café.

One of the arresting canvases in Chawky Frenn's show at The Art Center in Hargate at St. Paul's School in Concord is a self-portrait which he calls "The Scream." It's 6 feet long, nearly 3 feet tall, larger than life-size to accommodate the self-portrait of his head on the left, skull facing him on the right. The two images look at each other, Frenn's veins bulging, both mouths agape, across a void of black. Despite the title, despite the rage, the center of the canvas aches with silence.

Of the many disturbingly memorable images rendered by painter Chawky Frenn currently on exhibit at the Erie Art Museum, one has achieved a particular, haunting prescience since Sept. 11: "National Interest vs. Human Rights" depicts the Statue of Liberty surrounded by cloud-like skulls, more skulls skulking beneath her robes, and a hand reaching desperately out from her tablet. It's prescient because, despite its relevance to current events, Frenn painted the piece in 1993.

In the final analysis, artists have only one tool at their command - their minds. All their works are to be estimated according to the capabilities they possess for the cogency of compelling and incisive thought and the extent to which that thought is infused into their work. Everything else they employ are merely means to their ends - mechanisms that are pointless without a point having been given. The brush is a broom, the chisel a hatchet, paint is a stain, stone is stone and clay is mud - the found object is junk pulled form the trash, video a shadow coiling on a wall and film the flickering of an indecisive flame - until a meaning is injected into this merest stuff of the earth. The value is in what gets said, for art is, tin the end, an intellectual enterprise.

The art of Chawky Frenn is the real thing. In this exhibit's thirty-four exquisitely rendered oil paintings, Frenn faces the essential issues of our existence. His works are filled with images that find us forever positioned between the contending forces of life and death, good and evil, and religious faith and the despair of damnation.

Chawky Frenn is a painter who has nailed down the figurative mode, and this accomplishment gives him the license to convey anything he wants, including the grand theme: the elusive meaning of human existence.

The often-painful struggle to find meaning in a modern world that's caught between good and evil is the subject of a dramatic exhibition that comes to Bridgeport later this week. "Ecce Homo: Paintings of Chawky Frenn," an exhibit of 39 works, opens Friday at the Housatonic Museum of Art, where it will remain on view through July 20.

When Lebanese-American artist Chawky Frenn was a visiting instructor at Edinboro University of Pennsylvania, he dropped by the Hoyt Institute of Fine Arts in New Castle one day, unannounced, to show his work to executive director Kimberly Koller-Jones.