At Pacific Saw Works, Puzzling Paintings Make Surreal Sense

When I first got a glimpse of Milo Moyer-Battick’s paintings in person last year, the show was a small one, arranged on the wood-paneled walls of The Last Straw, an enigmatic artist-run gallery and gift shop in San Francisco’s Outer Sunset neighborhood.

At The Last Straw, Moyer-Battick showed dark, muted paintings overlaid with his own brand of pointillism, a diffuse smattering of dots that blur (especially if you take your glasses off) into a cohesive whole. But it was tricky in those close quarters to get the distance necessary to truly take in the effect — or confidently decipher a signal from the noise.

Now through July 19 at Pacific Saw Works, another artist-run space, this one in a former Oakland hardware store, we get an evolution of that visual scramble. In Moyer-Battick’s solo show Specific Saw Horse, clearly identifiable images borrowed from logos, diagrams and bygone recipes rub up against non sequiturs and punny wordplay.

“Ringo Starr bound and gagged,” reads the bottom of The Opposite of Snow, a painting that combines the Bic pen logo, Dance Dance Revolution arrows, Felix the Cat, Goodnight Moon and a chevron arrangement of ticks.

In The Opposite of Rhyming, illustrations of feet, the Pink Panther, the Raisin Bran logo and clam chowder packaging mingle in a zingy red, pink and yellow composition. This is just a cursory list; prepare for a delightfully zany version of “I spy.”

Not all of Moyer-Battick’s work is so eclectic. Several sign paintings punctuate the show with the sans-serif elegance of On Kawara’s date paintings, only to proclaim “Spinach,” “Cumulus cloud” and “OPSTAY” (the last one, fittingly, on a red hexagon of unprimed canvas).

But other pieces are so dense they attain a kind of Magic Eye quality. With a confident hand, Moyer-Battick layers thinly painted text and found imagery directly on top of one another. It takes selective, sustained focus to decipher these disparate parts. In Orange Ham and Eggs, we find a fish in a bowl, an old-timey violinist and cooking instructions (à l’orange, of course).

Throughout the show, Moyer-Battick encodes visual information into a personal, free-associative cypher. What are we to make of Elvis + Grease + “cook in hot, deep fat”? It’s a rebus that doesn’t quite parse, an equation that will never add up.

Thankfully, the work is well balanced between perplexing visual puzzles and straightforward — if meat-heavy — messaging. (Liver is one of the sign paintings, Half a pound of turkey Ninety pounds of pork is another.) Tucked into one corner, the showstopper Lorem Ipsum is the equivalent of a contemplative sunset, the word salad running around its edges a comforting babble.

Specific Saw Horse is a reminder that surrealism is just a few juxtapositions away from our seemingly ordered reality. When the real world feels increasingly uncanny, it’s practices like these — that dig deep into commonplace things and render them altogether strange — that really make sense.

‘Specific Saw Horse’ is on view at Pacific Saw Works through July 19, 2025. Email pacificsawworks@gmail.com to make an appointment, or visit the gallery Instagram for weekly open hours.