Bad Boy of ‘Best Intentions’

Still crazy after all these years.

And still cool, in a golden-oldies kind of way.

On view at Cal State Fullerton’s Grand Central Art Center in Santa Ana, Robert Williams’ recent paintings are lusciously loony, culturally subversive and cartoonishly explosive. They come from the same masterfully manic mind-set as his earlier work in the infamous bad-boys-and-girls exhibit “Helter Skelter” at the Temporary Contemporary space of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles in 1992.

That same in-your-face countercultural sensibility--which also fueled Williams’ work for underground Zap Comix in the ‘60s--resonates in a provocative show, “Best Intentions,” through April 29.

Only 18 paintings are on view, but that’s a good thing because Williams’ complex images demand time and attention.

A perennial anti-snob, Williams enjoys puncturing the pretenses of the art world and the rest of life. His paintings nearly burst with psychedelically styled narratives satirizing art practices, human sexuality, greed and gluttony, authority, power, technology, language and various domestic niceties.

Each piece is also a kind of sharply executed self-dissection, as if Williams had sliced his brain apart and let his rebellious reactions to--and naughty nightmares about--contemporary life spill out on canvas.

A faceless mouth devours its own oddball intestine-nose-appendage while its hand holds a painter’s palette in the painting, “Bastardizing of the Autonomy of Person, Place and Thing.”

In the same image, a large hole wearing shorts and sneakers swallows another hairy-kinky appendage. Another figure has a head comprising three cigarette butts in an ashtray. He leans against a garage whose sign reads “Garage Surrealism”--another of the painting’s three titles, its “Poolroom Title.”

The last title is, “Explanatory Nomenclature: Paint for Me the Picture of Being Here and There, and at the Same Time Everywhere, While Repairs Are Being Made to Elastic Truths, Rubber Physics and Malleable Cockamamie.”

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All three titles are given on the painting’s wall label. Together, the titles spoof the over-intrepretation and over-intellectualization of contemporary art and culture.

“Garage Surrealism” is the down-home version for regular folks, evoking Williams’ urge to expose hypocrisy and paint sweaty, lustful, unpretty truths.

Some of Williams’ work is more literal. In “Don’t Feed the Dog at the Table,” a homeless man rummages through a trash can, presumably looking for something to eat, while a father and daughter contemplate feeding Fido table tidbits.

Other paintings are punny, including “Play on Words,” a visual double-entendre on trench mouth and trench warfare.

Mostly Williams’ work plays like little movies, with multiple plot lines within each piece.

Sometimes, though, his execution feels static, as in “Child Bride,” which depicts a nubile young thing in a flour sack and her older, backwoods-Appalachian hubby.

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Obviously, Williams likes to shock sensibilities and pop eyeballs more than a little.

But “Best Intentions” is more than good comic-book fun.

It is savage cultural sniping as high art--though lowbrow Williams might object to the comparison.

Then again, much of the Grand Central show is on loan from The Tony Shafrazi Gallery in New York, which handles Williams’ work. Even countercultural Williams is now part of the established art scene.

Though he seems stuck in his signature style, you can’t help but respect his concern for injustice and excess. Williams shows us which way the wind blows, with righteous energy and irreverence.

SHOW TIMES

“Best Intentions,” Cal State Fullerton’s Grand Central Art Center, 125 N. Broadway, Santa Ana. Tuesdays-Sundays, 11 a.m.-4 p.m. Free. (714) 567-7233. Through April 29.