For the last 30 years Ray Yoshida has been a key figure in the Chicago art scene, and in turn a major behind-the-scenes influence on an entire generation of American artists. He taught at the Institute of Chicago and, along with some of his first students and colleagues (Jim Nutt and Roger Brown, for instance), formed the Chicago Imagists, which later spawned the Hairy Who? This exhibition contains his recent paintings and collages, two ongoing expressions of his interest in reworking imagery from popular culture. The four paintings have meaty density compared to the conceptual airiness of the 23 collages. Though Yoshida's paintings are impressive in their own right, I was captivated by the formal beauty and intellectual rigor of his collages, made of carefully dissected comic strips.

Yoshida uses blue and cream comics on white paper in !AUGH! to create an enigmatic diva in a soap opera with wordless dialogues. An attractive brunette is going about her business - but what is her business? She is shown with a series of melodramatic expressions: surprise, chagrin, happiness, blissfully soaking in a bubble bath, worrying, judging, condemning and just plain looking cute. All other characters and text (except the final !AUGH!) have been fastidiously removed. Fragments from the scenes are floating between images of our heroine, neatly ordered but cryptic clues to the invisible supporting characters and drama. Conversely, MMMMM is an abstract story of human sounds - without people. The characters are gone and only a few shreds of evidence are left: a hairdo or two, a hat, an arm in a suit, hints of clothing or furniture. There's a progression of speech bubbles containing exclamations, among them "UH-OH," "A-HA!," "OOGIE" and "UM HMM." These are the sounds between the existential dialogues of the missing or invisible characters. Again, Yoshida gives us pieces of the story and our imaginations knit them together.

In a particularly beautiful collage, ARG!, Yoshida devises a marriage of chaos and order. With formal precision he alternates luminous fragments of red, tangerine, magenta, plum and olive (like stained-glass shards) with austere black and white fragments. Drapery and textures swirl in the tiny fragments. Any kind of narrative is impossible to make out here and only one word, ARG!, says it all.

In this wonderful exhibition there's a disciplined intelligence and irreverent sense of humor still hard at work. Give in to it!

Reproduced courtesy of the Philadelphia City Paper