Robert Colescott at Phyllis Kind - modern painting exhibition

The parody in Robert Colescott's early "history" paintings, such as his send-up of Emanuel Leutze's icon, recast as George Washington Carver Crossing the Delaware (1975), was explicit and, with its lumpy modeling, deliberately heavy-handed. By the '90s, his antic, cartoony pictures had become more expressionistic and less clearly programmatic. The latest work rises to new levels of pandemonium, with images that, though less legible than before, cut closer to the bone. The familiar gutbucket blues vernacular and the affectionate rowdiness of northern California painterly funk are still in evidence, but the recent work shows Colescott freely indulging in stream of consciousness, expressed through a raw, improvised, fragmentary figuration.

Tastess lik chickens (2001) includes a pierced valentine heart, echoed by a palette pierced with brushes, a cascade of hamburgers, three little pyramids and a bunch of Kilroy-was-here, wide-eyed guys tucked into the general confusion. Loosely painted forms splay out from the quizzical lovers at center. Throughout the painting are less clearly defined shapes and stabs of the loaded brush. Like Guston (in his work of both the '50s and '70s), Colescott seems to be telling himself a story with every mark, though not one that you can always follow. The lightbulb in the upper left-hand corner might be an homage to Guston. (The title, written onto the picture, sounds like Eddie Murphy as Alfalfa rifling on oral sex.)

He begins this and other of his recent large acrylics by laying down a ground of quinacridone violet, a fiercely hot, beet-juice magenta that sometimes works the way Goya used black: as a gorgeous and scary narrative site. As with late Guston and George McNeil, no mark is without a possible figurative reading, and no absolute distinction is made between representation and abstraction. As always with Colescott, there is a bitter/comical send-up of racial and sexual proprieties and a minstrel show's worth of stereotypes. Along these treacherous fault lines, Colescott's anarchic imaginings and appetites are given free reign. Ole McWillie's Farm (2002) features an ice-cream cone floating against a blue sky; the vanilla-fudge and raspberry scoops might proclaim a yummy apotheosis of interracial sex. Unlike Glen Ligon's deconstrucrive reiterations of black jokes (or Richard Prince's white jokes), Colescott's comics are really comical: you may actually laugh, even while flinching at their edgier ironies. Really funny, nuanced and outrageous ethnic humor (like that, say, of Moms Mabley, Redd Fox, Myron Cohen or Garrison Keillor) is the right of those unafraid to turn it on themselves. At 78, Colescott is playing at the top of his game.

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