Peter Saul at George Adams and Nolan/Eckman

Peter Saul is one of those artists who never seems out of date because he has never completely been in sync with the dominant trends. A child of California funk, kin to Chicago's Hairy Who and kissing cousin of R. Crumb, his impudent, pop-surrealist paintings have long demonstrated that cartoons are not just for kids.

Two shows, one with work from the late '60s and the other current, 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 less overtly political, but still contain a sting. Picture windows, kidney-shaped swimming pools, flagstone decks and other markers of mid-20th-century luxury and prosperity have been pushed and pulled 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 out the distance between social castes, contrasting the shack at the lower edge of the canvas, accompanied by the words "low morals," with the fancy house above, accessed by a winding road. Houses, figures and streets billow, pulsate and merge, taking on a life of their own. Among the more or less "human" personae are a regular guy 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; some are split into cross-sections ranging from roofs and skylights to underground garages.

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

In his 1967 Art News 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, one hopes Saul will be able to maintain his subversive stance. After all, even John Waters is respectable now.

--Eleanor Heartney

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