Art in America, review by Liz Hirsch
2020
At first look, Raymond Pettibon’s exhibition “Pacific Ocean Pop” seemed sparse. Though the show contained dozens of recent drawings and collages by the prolific draftsman and satirist, known for layered, enigmatic, and often humorous portmanteaus of text and image—an illustrated checklist ran to twenty-eight pages—Regen Projects’s white box space was left almost entirely open, and the gallery was empty of other visitors due to pandemic protocol. Organized into thematic clusters surrounded by vast expanses of white wall, the works revolved around pop cultural references and motifs that the artist has employed for decades, including golden age comic book superheroes, Major League baseball, the clay animation character Gumby, and film noir. The semiotic open-endedness of the individual drawings was tempered by their arrangement into well-spaced groupings, offering navigable pathways for interpretation.
The thematic core of the installation was the ocean, with large drawings of waves anchoring neighboring clusters of smaller images. In them, rhythmic strokes of blue, green, brown, and chartreuse articulate the concave span of ocean waves as intersecting currents peak in height. The waves are about to engulf the small gray figure of a surfer in No Title (Making a wave); in No Title (Str8 Line) and No Title (The Clear-cut brow), all 2020, only the boards appear, rendered as crescent slivers of bright red and yellow peeking through. Pettibon invokes the ocean’s allegorical intensity, the drawings hinting at everything from looming climate catastrophe to the experience of image and info saturation in a world increasingly lived online.