Retrospectives are usually elaborate affairs that take place in museums or at least large galleries where an aura of art history hangs heavy in the air. But the usual rules don’t always apply to alternative artists who exhibit outside the mainstream art world, so it comes as no surprise that a Jim Sohr retrospective would take place at the Pickery, an ancient warehouse on Orange Street between Tchoupitoulas and the river. (A wonderful space, but be sure to call first, as the hours are predictably unpredictable.)

  Although Sohr has shown at taverns and alternative spaces over the decades since his release from Angola – where he learned to paint while serving time for marijuana possession – this show goes a long way toward conveying his unique worldview with unusual clarity, eloquence and conviction.

  Part of it has to do with that process by which paintings seem to "explain" each other simply by being properly curated in enough numbers to create their own environment. For Sohr, that’s a switch. For instance, some early-90s works, featuring extraterrestrial Chihuahuas with pointed green ears and armored hoop skirts, were first shown at Cafe Brasil. In Armageddon, the apocalypse looms as the ET Chihuahuas buzz some rubber ducks in a celestial wading pool while pre-fab pearly gates appear behind them, admitting scores of "saved" Chihuahua-cherubs with neon haloes. Despite the upliftingly redemptive theme, it’s an image that might seem a little freaky in an atmosphere of conspicuous tequila consumption. But in the fastnesses of the Pickery, the tone is more contemplative.

  Seen in context, Sohr’s work appears more autobiographical, or coherent, than we might have thought. His 1978 opus, Ida Come Home, an abstraction of floral and phallic symbols in a heart-of-darkness locale, suggests a peyote-crazed Gauguin of the swamps. But since then his imagery increasingly evokes the Wisconsin of his youth, a land of prairie flowers and grain silos, of lonely blondes, spilled beer and polka-haunted Wurlitzers. His oddly alluring 1983 opus Big Foot, a Gauguin-like view of some bathing Rhinemaidens in a setting like Bayou Lafourche in the Wisconsin dells, was a turning point. What followed was a plethora of pop-expressionist visions executed in ever lighter shades of pale.

  Divorce U.S.A. is a circa-1987 view of three demon harpies painted in a surreal, Picassoid style, like mad queens from a deck of deadly playing cards. All teeth, breasts, claws, flaxen hair and diamond rings, the leering demonesses convey something of the dark side of modern domesticity as seen from a mythic male perspective.

  True to his expressionistic sensibility, Sohr makes no effort to be subtle or philosophical, but instead opts to heighten the contrasts with ironic exaggeration. Even titles can reflect that Midwestern tendency to put a overly euphemistic face on things, as we see in The Puppies, a landscape of murderous Rottweilers, all fangs, blood lust and glossy black fur under a dangerously full moon. But here, as elsewhere, what gets you is the eyes.

  Sohr’s subjects, human or animal, have oversized eyes that seem to peer directly out of some deep dark pit of the psyche, a place of terrors and whimsies. In one recent work, an attractively bug-eyed blonde sits expectantly at a table, flaxen tresses framed by a vase of wilted, long-stemmed blooms. Although sympathetic in demeanor, she is shadowed by furtive male figures in the abstractly patterned background, and here the title – F.B.I. – functions as a kind of whispered aside.

But in another recent opus, Ice Cream Cone Eater, the femme in question suggests shadier instincts as she wags her pink confection triumphantly over a pocketful of greenbacks. It seems simplistic, but beyond the exultant, lecherous grin is a no-fly zone of the soul, one of the verboten places that Sohr manages to evoke with minimally cartoonish means. Yet, even here, a solitary daisy pokes through the hard-packed earth to signal a song of innocence to an oblivious world.

  And that pretty much says it all, because a weird innocence always pervades the freakishness of Sohr’s canvases. His vision seems totally off the wall at first glance. Yet people can relate to that all-too-human clash of contrasting sensibilities; hence his expressionism reflects the recoil that occurs when the perpetually innocent side of the psyche meets the heart of darkness that resides everywhere, whether it’s the Louisiana bayous, the Wisconsin dells, or any other place under the sun. .