[from the pressrelease] – Raymond Pettibon’s  Cutting-Room Floor Show (Part II) introduces recent explorations in both color and collage. Pettibon started working in collage in the mid 80’s with simple newsprint elements collaged onto black and white images, and in works from 1992-93, the process became more complex. In this current exhibition the collages are extremely worked, layering images and text to produce intricate scenarios and non-linear narratives. Also on view are his powerful paintings on paper, depicting an anarchic combination of the past and present. The works suggest that although history repeats itself, rupture is still possible.

The subject matter in these new works on paper are a continuation of Pettibon’s oeuvre: the landscape of war, politics, popular culture, and history. Eloquently playing with multiple ideas at once, Pettibon’s works have various levels of interpretation. As a result, a fluidity of images and text occur and meanings easily shift and change. The works operate comfortably between an explicit and implied narrative, making direct and indirect associations that elude a stringent definition.

Pettibon’s drawings seek to attract the spectator’s attention through their use of a familiar vernacular iconography that is already well established in the popular imagination, one that displays the emblems of optimism and bravery in a kind of equivalent to progress, the revelation of a social subconscious in which sin and pain dwell. In his illustrations, the perfectly-delimited roles of hero and villain become confused and interchanged, introducing a new relativism that calls into question society’s established values and immovable vision.