Can you believe that Fidel Castro is 75? Il was all over the television (well, it was on CNN in the middle of the night as I fought insomnia), and It got me thinking about why pop art has returned with a vengeance, It's not That times were simpler (they weren't, what with the bomb posing a bigger threat than AIDS), but rather there was a sense of the New (capitalization necessary, thank you). We were about to journey into a Great Frontier (ditto) - which is so unlike our blah Zeitgeist. JFK? Dubya? Need I say more?

Anyway, pop has exploded, with ground zero at Mixed Company, 60 North Third Street in Philadelphia. This joint is also headquarters for the local home offfice of Cocktail Nation, a most funky but chic emporium for all you bachelors and bachelorettes out there. Although Mixed Company features a whole slew of art that is always in high turnover mode, three painters are especially cool. No, better make that coolest. I'm talking about Jenie Moore, Jeff Schaller and Stango.

This tremendous trio travels on parallel tracks with a strange electricity that binds them together, thanks to a single muse with a chip on her shoulder. What they share is a habit of marauding the crass world of advertising illustration, then reinventing their spoils into fine art. Nothing new here - in fact I've been to shows that feature the same mindset, though through very tired art indeed. However, the dynamic energy that courses through the work of these three, plus what they yank from Madison Avenue then slap into said work, works.

Jenie Moore lets loose with a penumbra of paint that rows down a solipsistic slipstream and throws down a chainmaillined velvet glove as a challenge to any and everyone who encounters her work to hear her shout out loud. "I told you so." Scraps of brand names vie with slabs of color as she piles images atop images. However, this is no Jump-cut swipe hype for short attention spans, but her own cut and paste as she samples stuff found in fashion mugs. Still, though she does a mean watusi in stiletto heels across our media landscape, she makes it clear that Versace didn't die in vain

Every symbol she grabs hold of is reborn as touchstones that you better just look at - but keep your hands off, if you know what's good for you! She is also a canny artist who can "appropriate" a style and make it her own. Don't miss three paintings that amount to a triptych and reference Japanese animation, Vargas and DC comics.

Busy as a bee, Jeff Schaller piles it on thick - beeswax, that is, since his primary medium is that eons-old method known as encaustic. And yes. there is something of formal classicism to his oeuvre that is grounded in the pages of pulp magazines out of the '40s.This is another artist who can't sit still as he slathers into his work a maelstrom of language, found imagery and all around profundity while wearing a mask of banality.

His paintings are like billboards pasted on billboards pasted an billboards on the wrong side of a town that has gone bust. And sure, these billhoards have been exposed to the elements and vandals, so they're basically ribbons. These aren't palimpsests or pentimenti peeking out, but fossils that have worked their way lo the surface afler being buried for loo long. This is what Jeff Schaller offers the world, and tomorrow.

Stango timetrips, only one doesn't know if he moves through the years himself or if he tugs stuff from the past on up through today. He doesn't wear any rose-colored glasses and his bag isn't nostalgia. He silkscreens images onto canvas, then applies the goods. His brushwork shows a choreography that ropes a dope all over the cool medium he delivers as his message. Though he was a kid during the '60s, he has channeled that decade way better than most have, and he is the only artist I know who can make Marilyn Monroe not just vital, but glowing. Confirming ambiguity is his triumph of a forte, and there is the stench of napalm about his work. A perfect example of where he's coming from is a work that may be Cassius Clay - or then again. Muhammad Ali.

The vibe these three radiate is what's going to get their work in museums one day (a hint to all you collectors), and as a united front they are totally unstoppable. Amen.