ROBERT MILLER GALLERY.

PHILIP PEARISTEIN

After almost forty years, we can presume to know Philip Pearistein's art pretty well, and at first this selection of paintings seemed to fit snugly in the "more of the same" category. All the hallmarks of his wafer-dry style were in place--the axial, overlit limbs, the narcoleptic tristesse, the corny props. So it was easy to miss this show, which is to say, to see only an acknowledged master plugging away in his established idiom. Pearlstein himself, a taciturn gradualist, certainly wasn't going to advertise any changes.

But they were there. To begin with, this exhibition marked the first time the props seized the limelight. In retrospect, they've been encroaching since the '70S, when the original set of passive supports (rugs, chairs, hammocks) began to give way to an ever-gaudier array of furniture and kimonos. By 1995, the models were posed amid an incongruous menagerie of collectibles: geese decoys, carousel ostriches, foxes, even a lion. Here, though, the trend culminated in a coup: In the most striking pictures, the objects pushed the models aside and claimed the foreground. Instead of looking at the nudes directly, we saw them through the wire-frame cowling of an electric fan, the railing of a bench, the rigging of a model ship, or the elaborate ironwork of a weathervane.

The change has some interesting formal consequences. For one, the images cleave into two relief-like layers, with a scrim of air between them. But the main effect is interpretive. Until now, it was possible to downplay the props, to dismiss them as formal accessories, color opportunities. Or perhaps as red herrings, decoys designed to lure viewers toward dead ends. In these paintings, the blatant prominence and specificity of the props insisted on an active iconographic reading--the sort of reading Pearlstein's earlier pictures taught us to avoid.

The fan, for instance, bears on its chrome hood a squat, bug-eyed insignia: a reflection of Pearlstein at his easel. The temptation to identify the two, to see the artist as an apparatus, a wire eye, or gnomish version of Leonardo's geometric man, was enjoined by the artist's own representative. Even more conspicuously, in Two Nudes with Banner Weathervane, 1998, a dark arrow hovers above one of the nudes, only inches from puncturing her lap. The result was both a discomfiting intimation of violence and a wry parody of such intimations. Pearlstein was teasing us.

A sense of weird, dry, but unmistakable humor was evident elsewhere as well. In Mickey Mouse, Whitehouse as a Birdhouse, Male and Female Models, 2001, an antique Mickey puppet sits at the junction of male and female nudes, raising his hands to clash brass cymbals in a parody of sexual exclamation: Boy meets girl! In a particularly elegant but macabre picture from 1999, a woman lies supine, cuddling a knobby torso-shaped African drum like a lover. Sure, you could read this as an arrangement of forms in space, but the iconogruphy seems a deliberate challenge to such quixotic formalism. It's not that Pearlstein the anti-iconographer has become a painter of "subjects." Instead he seems to be making his ambivalence explicit, and in the process becoming a less familiar artist.

It's often been pointed out that Pearlstein's art belongs more strongly to its times than one might think As early as 1963, Sidney Tillim saw links between Pearlstein and his Pop and Minimalist peers: His bored nudes shared a factual chutzpah with Warhol and Judd. Later, when Pearlstein enlivened his setups with random tchotchkes, this too was recognized as a dissenting reflection of the '80s zeitgeist. And now, just when his art might seem least relevant, it turns out to be again obliquely participatory. Pearlstein is not just an empiricist in an era of ironists. He's looking more and more like an ironist himself--and maybe the weirdest, most poker-faced, most deadpan of them all.