Peter Gallo at White Columns

On a work in this show, Peter Gallo scribbled "I wish I could draw like Joseph Beuys" across a small watercolor-and-graphite rendering of one man giving a blowjob to another. It's a strange but compellingly personal juxtaposition of a sex act and an allusion to the unconventional German artist who regarded his own art-making practice as a means of releasing pent-up energy, and not creating precious masterpieces. This recent exhibition included 16 small-scale, homespun artworks mostly hung salon style. Materials ranged from oil paint, house paint and wire to dental floss, toothpicks and cookie tins. Heady references to high art, such as the one in Clyfford Still's Last Painting (1992)--a gloopy, brown oil-on-canvas work with "Clyfford Still" scratched into the surface--are counterbalanced by pointedly humble production values: this piece, set in a tatty, rough-hewn frame, sat inconspicuously on the floor, leaning against a wall, paying a very low-key homage to the renegade Abstract Expressionist who disdained interpretation of his passionately created art, which he insisted was nothing if not misunderstood.

Curiously, Gallo's most unsophisticated work resonates as his most powerful. One such example, www.godhatesfags.com (1999), comprises an embroidery hoop stretched with canvas and painted like a simple yellow smiley face with the painting's title in the place of its mouth. More refreshingly confrontational references to homosexuality come up in an untitled work for which Gallo covered a lawn-ornament skunk with linen, painted it light pink and then fashioned the word "FAGGOT" out of string stapled to the surface.

Another blowjob sketch became the background for romantic texts, including "you were radiant and resplendent you put to flight my blindness"; an untitled painting on an embroidered pillowcase hosts touching and perhaps surprisingly personal phrases like "he gave me a sweet and living knowledge" and "I gave myself to him holding nothing back." If one wants to intellectualize about Gallo's work, it doesn't make especially rigorous sense. But it does appeal on a direct, emotional level. And one easily comes to miss the good old days of the culture wars, when artists regularly went out of their way to challenge small-minded ideas about what counts as "lewd" or "vulgar."

Gallo, an art historian and frequent contributor to this magazine, finds tremendous power in emotional rawness largely absent from the art world these days. His work speaks to his own reality without descending into maudlin self-centeredness. Rather, Gallo shows us that he's content to simply admire, as in Oh Mondrian (1997-2000), a scrappy pastel rendering of a Mondrianesque grid with little hearts painted on it, or remind his audience of the often inhumane political climate we inhabit, such as that brought up in White Supremacy (1993), a found tapestry of a pastoral scene with sheep and a shepherd, the title scratched into painted spots on the fabric. [Gallo's solo "Goodbye Picasso" is on view at Freight + Volume, New York, through Dec. 3.]

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