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A couple of big, brightly colored photographs of painted car hoods merge automotive details of swooping and jagged shapes with the look of abstract hard-edge canvases, a painting term coined by California art critic Jules Langsner in 1959 — the dawn of a distinctly L.A. aesthetic.

How the hard-edge Joel from Season 1 became the softly anguished therapy patient of Season 2.

The book describes his affair with a white woman, his dreamlike, highly symbolic murder of an albino Indian, and an interlude in Los Angeles among hard-edge but nostalgic urban Native Americans and a trickster-like shamanic figure.

This work, which appeared at Martos Gallery in New York last year, would be funny anywhere, but in the context of a proper gallery in Manhattan shows Guyton gleefully mixing highbrow and lowbrow aesthetics, hard-edge abstraction from the Neo-Geo movement, with the beret-and-palette caricature of the chain-smoking artist, all through his signature urban materials.

He shares the deeply conservative ideology of his mentor Mr. Jordan but lacks the confrontational profile or hard-edge style of the Ohioan.