To followers of Albert Oehlen's work it is great pleasure to see his paintings out here in San Francisco, finally; and this might be another sign of how the city is becoming a global art center. This would mean that the aesthetic taste in the Bay Area, long judged as provincial, is venturing to join the rest of the greater artworld. But to be fair, the majority of the American art viewing public is not familiar with Oehlen's work. As a quick review, Oehlen's career began in the wild neo-expressionism of the '80s along with his more famous friend Martin Kippenberger (R.I.P.). They were like the Lennon & McCartney of the German art movement, or perhaps more accurately, the Gene Wilder- & Richard Pryor tandem that brought comedy while deflating the highly exaggerated pretensions of the artworld. Wasn't it Kippenberger that bought a Gerhardt Richter painting and turned it into a dining table? Meanwhile, Oehlen's strategies were performed on more formal levels, bordering on a farcical kind of conceptualism that nonetheless bludgeoned the conventions of painting to the point of ridicule. Perhaps this is the reason why Oehlen's popularity took a little bit longer. To begin with paintings are already slower to ingest, much more by being abstract. A handful of these types of works from 1988 to 2008 were recently exhibited at John Berggruen Gallery.

Untitled (Gelbes Kreuz), 1988, oil on canvas, 76 3/4 x 76 3/4 inches

These works from '88 to the present do have a knack of providing difficulty for the viewer. It seems Oehlen doesn't desire to build "meaning"--that mystifying impulse leading to claims of painting's "directness" or "ontological being-ness" romanticized by painters such as Van Gogh or Pollock. Rather, Oehlen is an iconoclast who dismantles established codes of picture making. The contourless lines on his paintings don't quite congeal to make form, or whatever might be construed as form gets obliterated in the next by bewildering gestural sweeps. The impression given is that the marks, if they can be animated with anthropomorphic character in the role of figuration, merely float into anti-gravitational disarray clumsily bumping into each other in a palimpsest play of screens. There are no Cezannean passages that weave the picture formally tight, or classical reassuring narratives for the viewer to work with. By all means the paintings should fall apart, and the most common question asked is whether they are even finished or not.

Right of Way Forever, 1998, oil on canvas, 76 3/4 x 76 3/4 inches

Paradoxically though, the claims above turn out to be the very qualities that make Oehlen a great painter. Of course at this point you might realize that issues of craft or skill are not at stake here, although Oehlen definitely has those qualities, albeit veiled. Nor is he popular right now as a marauding unskilled naïf like so many out there, but rather his mettle can be attributed to his fearless attack on what can be possibly painted and deemed acceptable to what painting is. Take for example his 1998 painting Right of Way Forever, where he refers to John Graham, an obscure Russian-American surrealist as his muse, and proceeds to do a portrait in the crudest possible manner: green and beady-eyed donning a slug-spaghetti mustache, with three solar-anus-flower cherub heads over commercial print color pattern. It defies logic, and, more specifically, the politics of taste. Oehlen therefore arrives at a time when painting seems to have reached its end, as not too long ago its proclaimed pangs of death still rattle within the halls of academia. The conventions of painting are exhausted they say and to continue in the ways of the past would be tantamount to grave digging and zombie existence. You can almost hear the Marxist hymn of tradition being a nightmare on the brains of the living. But Oehlen comes along and turns this critique on its ear and uses the very same critique to make paintings that turn out to be post-painting, or in his own words, "bad painting." And since then he has been its greatest champion.

These selected works from 1988-2008 have that way of expressing negation. If aesthetics can take the appearance of negation as when individual consciousness goes against prevailing cultural attitudes, then what we have at last is a political act. Oehlen in an interview ("Ordinary Madness," J. Heiser and J. Verwoert, Frieze, 10/10/03) would say, "Criticism is just another form, like comedy and tragedy. Criticism is like a label on a picture. What actually happens is something else. Something that eludes control." Thus, Oehlen's painterly provocations in the role of critical practice work as inoculation to painting's conventional disease. Critiques of painting done through painterly means can only preserve the vitality of this practice and its continued presence.

Untitled, 2005, oil on canvas, 70 7/8 x 59 inches

A final observation: midway looking through the "Untitled" of 2005 you're jarred by the recognition of a cartoon hand giving you a big thumbs up, as if saying, "Get it? OK, you win!"

Albert Oehlen: Paintings 1988-2008 was on view at John Berggruen Gallery from April 8th through May 17th, 2008.