William Eckhardt Kohler reviews an exhibition of paintings by Peter Williams, on view at Foxy Production, New York, on view through March 23, 2013.

Kohler writes: "The paintings of Peter Williams… are, in no particular order, hallucinogenic, acerbic, pained, beautiful, confessional, obsessive, critical, jarring, wild, weird and profoundly human. They are born from Williams' experiences of race, appetite and physical vulnerability. The visual lexicon is a heady blend of psychedelic color, abstract pattern, and cartoon-manic imagery… The beauty of these paintings is that they never fall into finger pointing or polemical politics, which tend to either preach to the converted, fall on deaf ears or let the complacent, liberal, art-world viewer off the hook. Through playful form, seductive color and an apparently populist cartoonyness, Williams invites us to live with uncomfortable, unanswerable questions. "