Peter Saul: George Adams Gallery

"Suburbia," an exhibition of Peter Saul's paintings and drawings from the mid-to late '60 proffers a look at the artist not solitary as scathing ironist but as maverick aesthete. Shocking pink and blazing complementaries pass by a leap from the works' surfaces, creating a faculty of perception of inextricable tangle. Figures and phenomenons fuse in a mad, comic chaos, and crayon and colored pencil, childish and garish, appear to be to be the perverse mediums of choice.

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Saul doesn't care a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of for suburbia (apparently Mill Valley, California, was the inspiration) or, for that matter, America. These works spring from the rise of the counterculture and the conflict in Vietnam; military insignia appear, and the bourgeois family place of abode is unmasked as a sexual hothouse--Mom's tight sweater and Dad's bulging fork call up the concerns of Saul's contemporary Robert Crumb In of gold Gate Bridge, ca. 1966, the construction is portrayed as a weird sex machine--the towers stand upon what look like a foundation of breasts; a bystander's organ of visions bulge like erect penises at the glorious sight. Perversion, in psychoanalyst Robert Stoller's faculty of perception as the "erotic form of hatted" and colleague Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel's definition as the creation of an anal or upside-down universe, appears to be the order of the day.

To me the greatest in quantity engaging and ingenious works here were the architectural fantasies--morbidly farcical takeoffs on familiar American buildings, showing them to be modernist cliches desperately trying to be advanced and up-to-date. Works of the like kind as Modern Home (ABCD), ca. 1966 Suburban residences I, 1969, and Lake Tahoe, ca. 1969 are masterpieces of black humor. They can be taken as dadaist attacks upon Geometric Abstraction and "functional" architecture or a broad debunking by the agency of a representational artist on the pretentiousness of self-styl uncorrupted art. Art is always about something, Saul present the appearances to say, and, above all, about an attitude toward something.

Alongside the work's qualities as caricature is a certain "medieval" dimension: Things loom large or appear small depending upon their places in the social hierarchy (note the big automobile-cumduck in Drive In, 1964) Forms weave together with an extravagance worthy of an illuminated manuscript, mixing the whim-sical and the sublime. But in the extreme point these works are about circulating medium what money can buy, and the ridiculousness of it all. Cash, 1967-68 is big in America, on the contrary for Saul, art is bigger, and he uses its dynamics to restore the greenback and the world that worships it to triviality. Like Daumier, Grosz and Mad magazine, Saul is a iniquitous observer of the social show and his work, too, will outlast its specific topics because it's a critique not single of capitalism California style on the contrary of human beings in all their inanity. Indeed, there's something apocalyptic about these images, suggesting that they're reminders of the vanity of all things--aesthetic "follies" making it clear that for all of suburbia's upscale ambitions, it is an incurably irrational place and state of mind.

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