Raymond Pettibon

Sadie Coles HQ, London
Through July 22

Raymond Pettibon's drawings employ language as an agent of redemption. A typically fluent ink sketch shows a baseball player stopped in mid-swing by a sudden epiphany, which is usefully written out above his head: "I'll write!" He'll write; and Pettibon, a serious bibliophile who recently compiled a fascinating book of excerpts from obscure sources, will read, even though reading is becoming a dying art. 'Let me get out my Palm Pilot... you see we have evolved,' another text murmurs darkly.

But Pettibon is no paranoid patrician. Though highly literate, he is also an inveterate lover of pop culture; regardless of academic standards, he looks incessantly for good things. Erudite enough to mimic Walter Pater's Aestheticist prose ("He had a radiant beauty of person, of a classic style, a heavy eye, marble lids," Pettibon writes beside a blocky portrait) he nevertheless fills out this show with enthusiastically inked renderings of 1950s cars and Californian landscapes, and drawings of musclebound wrestlers captioned with slightly altered Britney Spears lyrics.

A wall-text stating that "The range of his allusion is immense", is only half sarcastic, and Pettibon is clearly pleased to encompass this rich variety. His work is the cultural autobiography of a man with catholic tastes, and this explains its chaotic non-linearity; there's no logical starting-point to this show's plethora of drawings, push-pinned roughly into the wall. Viewing it is like trying to read a dozen randomly opened books at once.

Pettibon can be opaque, but he is also responsible. Refusing to dumb down his work, he uses quotation and allusion to point towards the storehouse of past literature and wisdom which may, in our networked, accelerated world, be becoming obsolete. Yet words themselves are slippery – an 'i', notes Pettibon, is 'a circle supported'; various drawings of Bibles testify to wrestlings with the slippery Scriptures.

Pettibon battles with language to discuss language. Above an image of three men diving into the sea to escape a gigantic, symbolic claw, he writes: 'Do I make myself clear; it is a cumbersome sentence I know, but I hope it is not – squawk! – unintelligible.' Not at all, and hugely entertaining as well.




Martin Herbert