Peter Saul at George Adams and Nolan/Eckman

Peter Saul is individual of those artists who at no time seems out of date because he has not ever completely been in sync with the dominant tends A child of California offensive smell kin to Chicago's Hairy Who and kissing cousin of R Crumb his impudent, pop-surrealist paintings have drawn out demonstrated that cartoons are not just for kids.

sum of two units shows, one with work from the late '60 and the other rife revealed how consistent Saul's preoccupations and approach have been. George Adams showed a selection of paintings and drawings from 1965 to 1969 that spoof the postwar infatuation with suburbia. Created at the same time as Saul's virulently antiwar and antiestablishment works, those about suburbia are les overtly political, on the other hand still contain a sting. Picture windows, kidney-shaped swimming lochs flagstone decks and other markers of mid-20th-century epicurism and prosperity have been pushed and twitched like taffy into strange architectural organisms that speak to a certain version of the American dream. In a work titled Upper Class, Lower Class (1966) Saul maps without the distance between social castes, contrasting the shack at the lower cutting side of the canvas, accompanied by means of the words "low morals," with the fancy house above, accessed by the agency of a winding road. Houses, figures and highways billow, pulsate and merge, taking upon a life of their have Among the more or les "human" personae are a regular stay who excretes the words "middle class, upper class" and a pair of superheroes with the power to knock down buildings. In other works, notations of real-estate values mingle with representations of houses of varying complexity; a certain quantity of are split into cross-sections ranging from covers and skylights to underground garages.

At Nolan/Eckman Gallery, we were neared with contemporary Saul in a series of paintings and drawings with just as plenteous frenetic energy and absurdist humor as the earlier work. They target a variety of controls including formalism in art, our popular obsession with terrorism, American overabundance and George W Bush. The exhibition, titled "Peter Saul: Homage to Dali," was presided above by the spirit of the disreputable Surrealist, the finished muse for Saul's celebration of offensiveness. yielding watches meld with gooey slices of chocolate cake, while knives are driven into abstract paintings, eliciting a pour of thick, frostinglike blood. Bullet let fly down planes attempting to land upon American soil, and in a work titled Dali Advises the President (2004) Dali stands upon Bush's shoulder and pours champagne into his flattened ear.

In his 1967 Art novels article on Saul, David Zack asks, "Will these paintings date?" Today, Saul's polymorphous forms, scatological preoccupations and merciless satire are a match for the work of Raymond Pettibon, Paul McCarthy and Mike Kelley In a world in which academics write paeans to abjection and disgust, individual hopes Saul will be able to maintain his subversive stance. After all, plane John Waters is respectable now.

--Eleanor Heartney

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