Brad Biancardi strikes me as one of those young artists I haven’t written enough about—and now I find out he’s moving to Chicago.

He graduated from UW with an MFA in painting and drawing in 2005, and has been a member of the artist-run Crawl Space Gallery pretty much ever since.

Last year, Piss President, the series of drawings and paintings he showed at Crawl Space based on government buildings in Washington, D.C., was the most restrained protest show imaginable—which gave it a sort of majestic tenseness. I regret not reviewing it fully.

Each building was depicted in skeleton form, like a computer model outlining its structure and its emptiness. The spaces were haunting, and some seemed even to seethe in the dim light of the gallery. Here’s one:

This month, Biancardi has a solo show of four paintings (including this one, with animalistic imagery I haven’t seen before in his work)

at Crawl Space; he’s also got a floor piece in Jim O’Donnell’s A Spectral Glimpse at Platform Gallery.

Those shows opened Saturday. (I haven’t seen them yet but can’t wait.) The openings onto other worlds in the center of Biancardi’s paintings are unsettling and inviting, wormholes for modernism’s sublime-in-paint to slither into the present through the cracks in the walls, grab you, and take you back with it, or maybe forward.