Martin Mull at Spike

Art in America, Nov, 2004 by Edward Leffingwell

Played out on postwar lawns, Martin Mull's suburban scenarios have a latent hysteria that suggests location stills for family sitcoms gone seriously awry. The deep shadow of an unseen observer falls on a recumbent young couple dressed in khakis and cardigans and situated in the ominous greenery of Tryst, a 6-by-5-foot oil on linen rendered in the faded grisaille of snapshots (all paintings 2003). Their meeting and its potential disruption are witnessed by a clip-art lamb and dog--emblems of innocence and fidelity--and by the busts of cartoon children, floating like putti.

No laughing matter, Mull's theme of threatened innocence haunts The Dance: an adolescent girl in bobby socks and saddle shoes attempts a box step on the lawn of a ranch-style house, partnered by a man in suit and tie who wears a grotesque clown mask. Recalling the unspecified horror of Robert Longo's "Men in the City" series, Mull's 5-by-7-foot elegy to parricide, War and Peace, is pervaded by a sense of violence. Here, a young woman in a pencil skirt and long-sleeved blouse collapses in the arms of her partner as though surrendering to some undetermined assault. In the lower left, a boy in a striped T-shirt inexplicably straddles a fallen figure from behind, pushing down on the victim's head, while a suited man in the middle distance seems oblivious to this strange event. Both paintings incorporate the device of a painted border, as though to distance the moment.

Another border, this one with a repeated oval medallion of roses, frames the somber scene of Evidence. It is cropped close to the low-pitched gable roof of a ranch house where a mysterious figure enclosed in the oval medallion floats by. There are pry marks on the door and windows, and a discarded garment has fallen on the stoop. Beneath the meager foundation, plantings are small, amorphous elements that resemble the glowing eyes of animals concealed in the gathering dark. Mull leaves the identification of the crime, if there is one, to the viewer.

In a similar spirit, he offers the inexplicably goofy Parents II, in which a boy and girl fitted out with rabbit ears grin a greeting from a Florida room furnished with '50s black metal-framed chairs and patterned vinyl upholstery, philodendra and a miniature orange tree bearing fruit. No evidence of evil lurks in this moment, unless assigned to the unseen parents of the painting's title, or to the unknown future.