Jesus and the Lawyers

IT ALL STARTED WHEN ARTIST Tim Pashley, stirred by those gaudy Yellow Pages ads of smiling personal injury lawyers (“Hurt? Injured? We Can Help!”), created a collage satirizing the breed. His disturbing work, titled “Our Lord Hands Over Responsibility To Those Who Care,” features a cut-out Christ surrounded by a heaven ly host of injured souls and grinning litigators.

Hung for sale by the Adkins-Hoover Gallery in the cafe of the Texas Club this fall, the piece lasted just two days before management of the downtown health spa for the well-heeled had it removed. “I can imagine the lawyers choking on their crab sandwiches, seeing themselves in there,” says Pashley. “I can understand. If I were a lawyer, I’d want it taken down.”

Although several lawyers depicted in the piece belong to the club, manager Kathryn Comfort insists the banishment had nothing to do with members of the club who are also members of the bar.

“We had an agreement [with the gallery] that we didn’t want anything that wasn’t tasteful and nothing with religious or political connotations,” Comfort says. “I saw this was religious, so I asked that it be taken down.”

One club member who saw Pashley’s work during its abbreviated run was Brian Loncar, a high-profile personal injury lawyer who advertises on seven TV stations and runs a radio ad read by shock jock Howard Stern. As Loncar himself admits, “I’d advertise on the side of dogs if it brought in business.” Far from griping about Pashley’s collage, he wanted one of his own-only bigger.

“I can laugh at myself,” he says. “Tim’s work is funny. It’s awesome.”

Visitors to Loncar’s Dallas office can expect to find Pashley’s collage behind the reception desk. “It should get the conversation going,” Loncar chuckles.

As for Pashley, he calls the commissioned work “better and bloodier” than the original. He included a pasted-in portrait of his patron, attorney Loncar, among the firmament of cash-carrying barristers.

Looking back at it all, the 35-year-old Englishman is hardly impressed with his ability to unhinge people in Dallas, where he’s lived for two years. “Banned in Paris,” he says. “Now that would be something,”