Paul Lamantia

[4][5][6] Lamantia often depicts surreal, distorted figures in transgressive scenarios, rendered in a formally structured, dizzying patterns, line and high-key color; he has been influenced by Expressionism, High Renaissance and Baroque art, and psychoanalytic theory.

[9] Critic Dennis Adrian called him "a Chicago maverick"[10] whose work "challenges and wrenches" the limits of acceptability and taste,[11] while Franz Schulze described him as one of the city's "most brutal and coldly expressionist" figurative artists.

His early visual education included underground comics, museum trips with his mother, his father's collection of 1940s soft-core porn and girlie culture novelties, and a 14-week scholarship he won to study drawing at the Art Institute of Chicago.

[29] His art is informed by travels he and his wife, Sheryl R. Johnson, have undertaken to thirty-four countries, including China, Egypt, Hong Kong, India, Mexico, Nepal, Russia, Thailand, Tibet, Turkey, and many throughout Europe.

[11][8][7][9] In monumental works, he depicted surreal, ambiguously-sexed figures and groups—sirens, buxom temptresses, leather-clad dominatrixes, voyeurs, and mutant beasts—undergoing dizzying transformations into giant insects, plant-like forms and horrific organic conglomerations, while engaged in discomfiting, sometimes predatory sexual dramas.

[1][47][4] Critics described the work as a tangle of bewildering abstract patterns, high-key color, frenzied line and strong contour, with contradictory forms that lacked a focal point or orientation to distinguish figure from ground.

[11][48][45][30] Simultaneously, they noted a clear level of formal structural integrity deriving from what Franz Schulze called Lamantia's "controlled wildness"[8] and his absorption of classical genre compositions of female nudes in interiors from Titian to Matisse.

[49][7][35][3] Works from Whisper (1980) to Blood Love (1993)[46] featured a subdued, finessed palette of whites, light yellows, pastels and deep purples, that enhanced the rhythms of streamlined, Baroque compositions employing illusionistic, theatrical space.

[3][49] Lamantia's paintings from the later 1990s onward returned to the more claustrophobic compositions of earlier work, incorporating the linear freedom of his drawings, but in a "less manic and tortured" form that critics described as "an amiable kind of chaos.

[45][1][49][50][30] Robert Cozzolino called works of the time, such as Like Father Like Son (1968), "extraordinarily raw and vulnerable" treatments of family, identity and emotional states, that portrayed the angst of the period and its "the-personal-is-the-political" ethos.

[52][44][53] Critics hold that the drawings, while thematically similar, are neither tangential nor mere studies, but autonomous, open-ended works that explore oneiric, metaphysical and visionary pursuits with a searing, concentrated energy.