Raymond Pettibon at Regen Projects

Certain recurring iconography is quintessential Raymond Pettibon: breaking waves and other emblems of SoCal surf culture, along with superheroes, dogs, racehorses, Hollywood, and the endlessly malleable Gumby and, as the old theme song for the green guy’s TV show went, his “pony pal Pokey, too.” The new drawings and collages in the artist’s eleventh solo outing here, more than half of which were made in 2020, included mainstays but also addressed the myriad traumatic events coincident with their making. Pettibon’s familiar skewering of American venality and imperialism became even more stringent through a summer of dispossession and violence, pictured across media outlets as a vision of California on fire (and here, particularized differently in a depiction of Los Angeles City Hall burning). Clustered works recalling redlining and forced busing provided something like historical context. Pettibon’s exhibition felt especially sharply drawn in a fall season when the election and its national reckoning loomed. Always catholic in his purview, the artist produced this effect in his heterogenous images of homespun gangsters (as, for instance, in a selection devoted to the Depression-era bank robber John Dillinger), as well as incarcerated clowns; a fiery censure of the infamous red-baiter Joseph McCarthy; and a close-up rendering of an erect penis that, in a masterful curatorial sleight, performed a deictic function in pointing to another drawing featuring a top-hatted, simian Michelangelo with a figure that could be Michael Jackson, Bubbles, or an amalgamation of both.

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