Peter Saul at the Hall Art Foundation

Guest Contributor Joshua Sevits / The Hall Art Foundation in bucolic Reading, Vermont, is located in a faithfully restored stone farmhouse with three large barns, each of which has been turned into exhibition space. The barns now incongruously house a retrospective of Peter Saul's Day-Glo paintings of giant combustive genitalia, serpentine poop, and uncompromisingly violent characterizations of western civilization. This attentively organized exhibition spans fifty-three years and comprises thirty-seven works--ranging from meticulously nuanced compositions to crude political caricatures--that vividly reflect many of the painting sensibilities that prevail today. 

At his best, Saul is a bitterly sardonic painter who applies precise craft and the jaw-dropping use of color to intuitively arranged compositions. Above all, Saul is a driven storyteller whose work is never boring. A sense of frustration permeates Saul’s early paintings from the late fifties through the mid-sixties. These pieces were made before Saul discovered acrylic mediums and before he began addressing political and social issues--the American war machine, the systematic brutalization of women, victimization of minorities, the plight of poor and indigenous peoples, and the overall shallowness of everyday life. The small oil paintings reveal him as a young artist beginning just after the tumult of Abstract Expressionism. But while the works on paper may owe their seemingly haphazard mark-making to Gorky and de Kooning, Saul also developed a penchant for surreal representational and figurative imagery, often interjecting, in line with Pop Art innovations, something commercial or industrial: a hat, a cigarette, a glove, a submarine. This practice helped ground his work in the provocative social critique that distinguished the Chicago Imagist group with which he is closely associated.