Peter Saul. Singing Sandwich, 2014; acrylic on canvas; 60 x 72 in. Courtesy of David Kordansky Gallery. Photo: Fredrik Nilsen.

Saturated with absurd hybrid creatures, social and political satire, and references both timely and historical, Saul’s work has always been perplexing. As a result, critiques (when they have been leveraged at all) have been overwhelmed by the need to explain, decode, and find reasons why his works were made using iconography above all else. Certainly, the lampooning of art-historical subjects through the familiar icons of American culture and politics is a huge part of Saul’s work, but such analysis tends to ignore the artist’s idiosyncratic style and technique as clear evidence of the enjoyment he clearly derives from making work—an enjoyment as deviant as the uncouth subject matter he tackles.

Some Crazy Pictures is clear evidence of an unbridled enjoyment derived from the act of painting, showcasing the specificity of style and paint-handling that Saul has perfected over the years. The nine large-scale paintings in the exhibition hover uncannily between surrealist figuration and impressionistic abstraction. Figures and objects appear to flow into and out of one another, forming compositions that keep the eye in constant motion within the frame of the canvas—each one a closed visual system like a tangled, madcap Möbius strip. The interplay of forms, paint application, and bizarre subject matter seamlessly support and reinforce one another. Since the ’80s, Saul has played with fluid forms and cultivated effects alternating between sharp-edged lines and softly brushed areas of paint. These juxtaposed forms and styles create illusions of dimensionality and texture, heightening the effects of a caustic color palette and evoking a sense of images coming into and out of focus. Intensified by the paintings’ scale, the wacky subjects beg a closer look, yet become abstracted and impossible to apprehend as a totality when the viewer complies.

Peter Saul. Mondrian Duck, 2015; acrylic on canvas; 60 x 72 in. Courtesy of David Kordansky Gallery. Photo: Fredrik Nilsen.

The relationship between surreal subject matter and Saul’s painting technique is well illustrated in Mondrian Duck (2015). The work’s title sets a tone of irreverence—not unlike the title of the exhibition itself—by crassly and unceremoniously identifying its subject matter. Such directness is the viewer’s first clue that the duck is a red herring (an iconographic duck decoy, if you will). The real intrigue of this work seems to lie more in trying to discern figure from ground, duck from Mondrian canvas—a wonderfully impossible task given the parts of the composition interlocked within an infinite loop of chaos. Sharpness of form gives way to painterly patches of canvas. Just as it begins to materialize, the illusion breaks, creating a visual effect that mimics the frenetic, ambiguous action of the scene.

Stylistically, Saul’s new works pay homage to MAD Magazine, which the artist has cited as an early influence. Saul’s work has always been equally conversant with the world of American television, magazines, and animation as that of fine art, forcing them into irreverent confrontation. Singing Sandwich (2014) harkens back to the Claymation style popularized in the ’80s and ’90s, showcased in the television show Pee-Wee’s Playhouse and in Nickelodeon cartoons, as well as the satirical drawings of R. Crumb. Stylistic affinities are established through Saul’s unusual color palette and use of acrylic paint—a medium associated with fine art—to mimic the qualities of three-dimensional sculpted surfaces and the visual effects of lowbrow spray paint.

Peter Saul. Some Crazy Pictures, 2015; installation view, David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles. Courtesy of David Kordansky Gallery. Photo: Fredrik Nilsen.

As a young artist, Saul distinguished his work in stark contrast to the interests and aesthetics of Abstract Expressionism, inventing a visual language that would come to be associated with Pop Art. Now in his eighties, Saul has consequently enjoyed first the relative solitude of working outside the “art world” and, more recently, the embrace of that art world, of which his current exhibition at Kordansky Gallery is a shining example. The style Saul continues to employ occupies an interesting place in contemporary art practice. Young painters like Matthew Palladino, Conrad Ruiz, and Jamian Juliano-Villani indulge in color-drenched, pop-inspired figuration, recapturing styles of the now-vintage popular culture and regarding artists of Saul’s generation as standard-bearers. Figuration of this kind may be an antidote to so-called “zombie abstraction,” which is perhaps productively understood as Abstract Expressionism’s 2015 counterpart. Saul continues to occupy an anti-trend position, yet he also seems to have spurred and participated in a countertrend by doing so.

Taken on their own, Peter Saul’s new works demonstrate the artist’s continued, unapologetic enjoyment of lampooning popular and elite subjects alike, executed in an exuberant style wholly his own and shot through with fun.

Peter Saul: Some Crazy Pictures is on view at David Kordansky Gallery in Los Angeles through June 20, 2015.

Visitors in the Broad’s third-floor gallery space, before art walls are constructed, February 15, 2015. Photo by Ryan Miller/Capture Imaging. Courtesy of the Broad.

Diller Scofidio + Renfro have managed to design a building that, in reality, is both underwhelming and garish at the same time. The Broad’s “veil,” an already-infamous element that the architects liken to a honeycomb and Christopher Knight has humorously compared to a cheese grater, forms both its façade and ceiling, which previewers experienced fully with the raw unveiling of the third floor. The success of the design is certainly in capitalizing on LA’s ability to deliver sunshine almost daily, and the skylights and windows formed by the veil do admit light judiciously (though one wonders whether works on paper can be shown in this space at all). Visitors entered through either the stairwell or freight elevator, ascending to find the bright white space free of temporary walls and visible artworks; the gallery seemed to fall victim to the real-estate truism that an empty space feels smaller than one filled with objects. The dynamism of the ceiling was immediately striking—its futuristic modular skylights seemed to tilt the room diagonally like an unsettling Kirchner painting—but it’s hard to imagine works of art having to compete with the ceiling and façade.

Preview rush line, the Broad, February 15, 2015. Photo by Ryan Miller/Capture Imaging. Courtesy of the Broad.

From the inside, one sees that the honeycomb modules are positioned on the ceiling and walls in a variety of window sizes that let in light from different angles; they function less as an endlessly repeating pattern than as a sequence of camera-like enclosures that frame various views, a comparison that might lend new appreciation to the odd, gargantuan oculus facing Grand Avenue. And whereas the skylights and windows facing Grand Avenue are smaller, with visitors having to squint to get a sideways look at the street outside, the larger ones facing Walt Disney Concert Hall across 2nd Street will be an unfortunate cautionary reminder of how quickly architecture can look dated. The press materials’ description of the façade as a “porous veil” is reminiscent of architect Yoshio Taniguchi’s claim that, with more money, he could “make the [Museum of Modern Art, New York] architecture disappear” back in 2006. The Broad feels about as porous as MoMA’s architecture is invisible. Visitors are just as hermetically sealed in the gleaming white cube of the third-floor gallery as they are in most modern art museums—only here there is a very ostentatious ceiling for the future artworks to compete with.

The Broad under construction, view from Grand Avenue in downtown Los Angeles. Photo © Iwan Baan. Courtesy of the Broad.

To “activate” the space during the preview, the Broad exhibited a 16-channel sound installation called DTLA (2015) by Swedish composer BJ Nilsen, which projects a pastiche of urban sounds from the landscape of Los Angeles. Ambulances, traffic, metro-station announcements, wind chimes, and seagulls could be heard through speakers lining the Grand Avenue side of the space. However, like the tagline “All Eyes on Grand Avenue” on the construction-site banner outside the museum, the piece primarily serves as a reminder of the ghost-town atmosphere of this part of downtown Los Angeles. After sunset, a minimal sound and light piece, Stillness (2010) by Los Angeles-based artist Yann Novak, was activated on the opposite side of the gallery. Though not made specifically for the Broad, Stillness was somewhat more successful as a serene, Zen-like meditation on sound and light, invited by the emptiness of the museum. Despite the media frenzy surrounding Eli and Edythe Broad and the art world who’s-who of the preview, Novak’s slowly changing, two-tone color projection created an atmosphere of contemplation.

Yann Novak. Stillness, west wall of The Broad’s third-floor gallery. Photo by Chris Wormald. Courtesy of the Broad.

Despite the quiet of Grand Street on a typical Sunday, the Broad will join a dynamic cluster of downtown cultural institutions, including its immediate neighbors REDCAT, Walt Disney Concert Hall, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Geffen and the art district are not far away. The Broad promises to be a “worldwide lending library” to other museums, making its collection available to international audiences. This aim is supported by the building’s second floor, a dedicated vault space. Hopefully, the collection will serve as an active resource for its local public as well, modeling a generosity that its “porous” design promises but doesn’t quite fulfill.

Neal Rock: Herm 0714; installation view at Loudhailer Gallery, July 19 to September 6, 2014. Courtesy of the Artist and Loudhailer Gallery.

Most successful is Rock’s demonstration that the idea of an artistic medium is best understood as encompassing both material and process—as the intersection of inert substance and physical action. He achieves this by using paint as both a tool for mark making and as a material or armature on which to print, paint, and construct. It is not only used as paint in the traditional manner, but also as a canvas and a sculptural material to be molded and shaped. This contortion is a physical exertion as well as a visual experiment with color, abstraction, and patterning. Rock has, in this work, moved from applying paint directly onto silicone to using a screen for printing the pigment; this allows the artist to create tension between regular patterns and the natural contortion of the supple silicone. Examples of both techniques are present in the gallery, to great advantage.

Neal Rock. Delft Prosopon II, 2013; silicone paint, Styrofoam, and MDF; 19 x 12 x 7 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Loudhailer Gallery.

Rock also explores material possibilities by incorporating Styrofoam, fiberboard, and canvas. This work seems, in large part, to operate on the notion that when two or more materials are combined, the resulting object is something novel—not merely the sum of parts, but a new kind of object. This lends itself well to the metaphor of the herm, an ancient Greek architectural element and sculptural form that is typically a hybrid between a stone pillar and statue. The herm is referenced in both the exhibition’s title and the title of many of the works, and the press release states:

“Rock addresses the herm as a cultural, spatial, apotropaic object that simultaneously entertains adornment, translation, and masking…. An address to the body as queered, made-up, defaced, contorted, atrophied, and decaying is conveyed—via the herm—through an idea of the prosthetic and the mask.”

Certainly, the contortion and decay described above resonates with the visceral experience of encountering this work, but the connection with the text is oblique and, much to the disservice of the artwork, never fully articulated.

Neal Rock. Proposal for an Absence III, 2014; oil on canvas over board; 13 x 11 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Loudhailer Gallery.

The potency of the herm seems to lie in the idea of hybridity, particularly (though not explicitly in the statement quoted above) of materials and especially in the tension between painting and sculpture, both as artistic practices and traditions. Though Rock insists on situating his work within the narrative of painting, the strongly emphasized reference to the herm ties these objects inextricably to that of sculpture as well (which rings very true to the experience of encountering them physically). Interestingly, herm derives from the Greek work herma, meaning stone or rock. Herms have taken various forms, ranging from stone pillars with minimal anthropomorphic elements to full statues of Hermes, further underscoring their hybridity and constant state of transition and transformation.

Neal Rock. Schwarze Prosopon, 2014; silicone paint, Styrofoam, and MDF; 25 x 13 x 8 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Loudhailer Gallery.

There is a wealth of possibility in the evocation of such a historical artifact by a contemporary artist, including notions of queerness rendered concrete. However, the overall presentation of this work is underserved by the vague gallery text, which functions more as an obfuscation than an explanation; it only scratches the surface, while questions about the oscillating solidity and permeability of artistic medium, abstraction, and representation are left virtually untouched. The artist is certainly to be commended for evoking these connections, and the experience of encountering these objects is delightfully filled with intrigue and mystery.

Neal Rock: Herm 0714 is on view at Loudhailer Gallery in Culver City through September 6, 2014.