A Colorful Commentary on Society, Spiked With Humor

William Norton’s stylish folk paintings at Ernie Wolfe Gallery tell wild tales filled with injustice, suffering and death, yet they never get bogged down in sleazy morbidity or treacly moralism. A sharp sense of humor saves these colorful images from being heavy-handed or glib.

Strangely infectious, Norton’s spirited humor lures viewers into a wacky, all-the-world’s-a-stage drama that highlights life’s absurdity. Riddled with quotes (and misquotes) from Moses, Job, Castro, Marx, Lincoln and W.C. Fields, the cartoonish paintings articulate a pretty sophisticated view of international politics and global economics.

On a sheet of tin push-pinned to the wall, pink-skinned acrobats bedecked in glittery tights fly through space as they discuss how O.J. Simpson and Newt Gingrich symbolize--and shed light on--contemporary race relations. In Norton’s hands, the inside of a garbage-can lid can become a neatly framed tondo depicting a man and a woman spinning around each other like the yin and yang symbol, as they profess that everyone has the right to earn a living.

Among the 29 works displayed, the biggest shows Rockefeller and Rothschild dancing atop teetering towers of building blocks inscribed with names of corporations they control and agencies they influence. In other works, money and power collide with biblical teachings, as all types of people carry on animated conversations with ducks, snakes and sharks. Wisdom and idiocy freely intermingle in Norton’s tales of hope and depravity.

Painted and drawn on doors, shutters, Masonite, paper and plywood, the 70-year-old artist’s snappy pictures rarely oversimplify complex issues. Never didactic, they appear to be motivated by a deep curiosity about all aspects of society, demonstrating that no single system or theory can account for all of life’s contradictory meanings.

Norton’s own experiences doubtless figure into the flexible worldview presented by the paintings. As a 19-year-old soldier with a wife and child, he fought in World War II, liberating an Austrian concentration camp. In the mid-1950s he became a California park ranger and successful screenwriter, specializing for the next 20 years in rough-and-tumble action films like “The Scalp Hunters,” “Brannigan” and “White Lightning.”

In the mid-1980s he was incarcerated in France for trying to smuggle guns into Northern Ireland. Freed on the condition he leave the country, he moved to Nicaragua and then Cuba. Kicked out of the former and disenchanted with the latter, he recently returned to California, where he took up a paintbrush only two years ago.

The best thing about Norton’s readily accessible pictures is that they’re neither bitter nor cynical but driven by an untiring desire to make sense of the mad world we live in.

* Ernie Wolfe Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 582-1500, through September. Closed Sundays through Tuesdays.