DOWNTOWN

For the last 20 years, Richard Ralph Roehl has been creating paintings and sculptures that combine bad taste, surreal humor and fine craftsmanship in an attempt to comment on some of the more insidious abuses of American society. Fusing personal and patriotic symbology with overt sexual imagery, Roehl takes on rape, murder, the power structure, religion, family life and bigotry in a series of works that satirize injustice and vulgarity by pushing them to their obnoxious limits.

This overcrowded mini-retrospective includes both Roehl’s cartoon-like paintings--a cross between the Surrealism of Max Fleischer and the Post-Pop imagery of Kenny Scharf--as well as his sculptures and assemblages, the latter a high-tech fusion of Ed Kienholz, Man Ray and consumer fetishism. While one cannot deny Roehl’s sincerity and skill in expressing concern over society’s ills, one can question the integrity of his strategy.

Accentuating disgusting imagery so that it self-destructs under its own weight is a dubious aesthetic at best, for it wallows in the very excesses it attempts to critique. Also, Roehl has set up a number of conceptual defense mechanisms that seem designed to deflect any possible criticism or incisive reading of his work. While admitting that his oeuvre is an expression of rampant artistic ego, Roehl cushions it by stressing/parodying the economic base of its production. He refers to himself as “R.R.R. Enterprises,” a self-deprecating title that situates the work as both commodity and anti-commodity, as exploiter and exploitee. Roehl thus tries to have it both ways, as both propagator and debunker of the system he despises. By trying to outmanoeuver the potential critique, Roehl merely accentuates the work’s innate insecurities. Rather than expressing ego, it merely denies its existence. (Thinking Eye Gallery, 1318 S. Figueroa St., to March 1.)