Peter Saul's ruthlessly comic and politically incorrect drawings and paintings begin at the neck and continue maniacally upward, closely documenting quite alarming distortions. As the artist Carroll Dunham notes in his introduction to the show's accompanying catalogue, "Saul's visual thermostat is set high—the threshold of his pictorial circuits must blow the fuses of many contemporary eyeballs." Saul's lovingly constructed fantasies slalom through a course of Zap Comix, Pop art, Cubism, and Surrealism. After all, this is an artist whose stated aim is to reconcile de Kooning with Mad magazine.

Peter Saul was born in 1934. He has recently returned to the New York area after nearly twenty years of living in Austin, Texas. This is his second show at Nolan/Eckman Gallery.