Courtesy David Nolan Gallery, New York

Peter Saul, "Ok, I Messed Up…" (2003). Acrylic on canvas, 67 x 59 in.

October 2008 Reviews

Manifesta 7

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Chantal Akerman

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Erkka Nissinen

There is No There There

Elaine Duigenan

Kerry James Marshall

John Massey

Bridget Riley

Pipilotti Rist

Thomas Helbig

Armando Andrade Tudela

Gary Hume

Marine Hugonnier

Peter Saul Despite Economic Woes, L.A. Museums Grew Their Collections in 2008 Art LA: Everything Great but the Sales Eric Doeringer in Philadelphia Chinatown Fire Drill Dealers' Choice Curator's Voice: Norman Kleeblatt on “Action/Abstraction” Growth Spurt

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My introduction to Peter Saul’s claustrophobic universe came in 1983 at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. I was in a profoundly altered state of consciousness and, consequently, standing in front of his 1968 painting Typical Saigon for what seemed an eternity proved to be an excruciatingly demanding and satisfying encounter—one in which the comfort level afforded by more theoretical means of social critique and polite systems of delivery was entirely absent. The ill-mannered visual forces at play were locked in a continual melee where tracing each restless sightline would lead from one vulgar character to the next, each enacting cruel punishment on another. Twenty-five years later, as I looked at it in a more clearheaded state of mind, this impudent picture was no less challenging to experience. The issue that comes forward as in so many of the paintings at the modest but thoroughly engrossing survey at the Orange County Museum of Art is one of overwhelming pictorial embodiment. The shallow writhing space of Typical Saigon, with its ferocious color, serpentine bullet trajectories, and tangled figures, acts as a compositional labyrinth from which Saul offers no exit. This is a fitting method for representing a parodic quagmire of military perversion and a trap that implicates the leftist viewer in a constant reversal of empathy and arrogance. Liberating reversals of position are a constant organizational structure in Saul’s paintings; structural foregrounding of characters and elements in his infected scenes renders ethical impulses futile, equating our best and worst drives as viewers. In Ok, I messed up… a portrait from 2003, the distorted figure’s admission of guilt is quickly followed by “What’s next?” — a perfect mock-apology from an incorrigible antagonist.

"Peter Saul" originally appeared in the October 2008 issue of Modern Painters. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Modern Painters' October 2008 Table of Contents.