Peter Saul, OCMA

Peter Saul, OCMA

Peter Saul currently has some large paintings very nicely arranged on some well-lit walls in Orange County. Who is this guy, and how did he manage to get a museum retrospective? These are questions that didn’t exactly plague me, but that I could by no means answer as I walked through the space. Large and beautifully colored, the paintings run the gamut of depiction from old popish cartoons to grotesque twisted forms vivisecting, chopping, conquering and converting each other. It’s difficult not to like a guy who paints heads being chopped off and liberally uses fluorescent paint, but his subject and color choices are far more sophisticated than merely testing the limits of the visible light spectrum. In the newer paintings he has traded the surface intrigue of his earlier works in oil for rhythmically daubed acrylic, building stylized, freakish humanoid forms in rich colors that seem to provide better than the usual color yield acrylic has to offer. He has weighed in on a variety of subjects, his illustrative approach creating a feel for the paintings that rests somewhere between editorial and satirical, whether it be cops fighting punks on a subway, or conquistadors doing their genocide thing.

Most telling for me perhaps is a quote on one of the placards from Saul himself: “It’s the intellectual dignity of modern art that upsets me, excites me to paint like I do.” There must be some sort of dignity someplace in a man to motivate him to invest so many years into so many large-scale works. With his fantastic proclamation, Saul seemingly attempts to separate himself from the rest of the art world at large, and indeed it’s easy to imagine that for a great many years his stylized, representational works were likely at odds with what everyone else was doing. But here he is, hanging in a museum, with the likes of Baldesarri and Burden across the hall, so he must not have been all that removed. In fact, he is at his best lampooning the established, accepted art stars, his “Francis Bacon Descending a Staircase” and not one of the larger works in the show, is possibly the best and most poignant piece that Saul has brought out of storage. At once a reference and an acknowledgement of Duchamp’s destruction of objective painting, which Saul is still sore about, and Francis Bacon who Saul apparently looked at a time or two. Pretty much says it all.

I also revisited the “Art since the 1960’s” show across the hall, While the first time I walked through the show a couple months ago, the show served mostly as a back drop to the Disorderly Conduct show, something to fill the space, and definitely not a destination in and of itself. It sat quietly and confidently in the corner, smug as it knew something that Disorderly Conduct didn’t. Seeing it again, reminded me how truly progressive art can be, and makes one long for the humor, insight, and challenge of other times. Sure, some of the work is almost 50 years old but it still feels as engaging as anything new. Ok, so it’s also pretty much just stuff from OCMA’s permanent collection and most of the works are second string, oddly arranged, and dusty at best, yet put together it adds up to create a representation of a community of individuals, however loosely linked, attempting to understand, document and affect their time. Which lets face it, is pretty cool.
--Snowflake