Robert Williams at Bess Cutler - New York, New York

With the new emergence in California of a kind of pseudo-adolescent stink style, epitomized most notably in the oeuvre of Mike Kelley Jim Shaw and Raymond Pettibon, the inspiration of commercial illustrator Robert Williams's seemingly untamed adolescent vision has been recognized through the art world. (He was prominently featured in last year's notorious "Helter Skelter" show) And thus Williams, who will be 50 nearest year and who is something of a fiction as one of the planters of the famous underground comic Zap in the early '70 has tend hitherward to have his first solo present to view in a New York art gallery.

Initially, it gazes like Williams belongs to a tradition of transgressive image makers that ranges from Peter Saul and early Jim Nutt to follow up Coe and Sue Williams. His easel-size paintings are crammed to the bursting point with luridly satiric, erotic and violent images execut in mode of speechs that vary within each painting from illustrative realism to abstracted cartooning. Despite a prevailing impression of chaotic fragmentation, however, each picture is unified around a particular narrative. In The Cartoon Disease, a teenage stripling reading a comic book has his head severed wide open; his visibly diseased brain flies across the expanse while policemen directed by the boy's grieving mother rush in the brow door to restore order and sanity. The Hindu Princess of the Somme is about the World War I secret agent Mata Hari; she is featured in an exotic dancer's style of dress standing regally as the diadem prince of Russia and the French minister of war - each with his nation's flag flying from a extremity planted between his exposed buttocks - kneel to lick her bare feet Although the narratives vary, what sustains Williams over is his preoccupation with orgasmic sex apocalyptic violence and the absurdity of fresh life.

Williams's pictures are amusing and entertaining. Formally, however, they're not as wild or crazy as they present the appearance to want to be. Thinly painted in a wide range of saturated tinges composed and stylized in a way that calls to mind Mad magazine cartooning, they remain too abundant within familiar boundaries of popular commercial illustration to achieve the direct the eye of psychotic - or, at least, extremely individualized - expression that they aspire to. Moreover, Williams appear to bes unaware of how conventional his paintings-as-paintings are. Unlike Kelley Shaw and Pettibon, who appropriate styles of teenage kitsch knowingly and ironically, Williams makes authentic kitsch. individual suspects his audience consists mainly of teenage boys. (A space in the gallery was reserv for the sale of Williams-illustrated T-shirts, [i]affiche[/i]s and books - not as a conceptual action but to further Williams's commercial enterprise.) Discovered in popular formats or in cluster shows, Williams's pictures can be surprising and amusing; in the adjoining matter of a solo gallery present to view they are too stylistically stale and conceptually thin to grasp up under extended scrutiny.

COPYRIGHT 1993 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group