From The New York Times

Everest Hall
Through Nov. 10

Well-schooled technique gets a kick in the pants in Everest Hall's first New York solo show, made up primarily of masterly graphite drawings and oil paintings with perversely unpalatable contents. Mr. Hall bases his work on found photographic images, lifted from magazines or Internet databases catering to marginal tastes, irreverent or fetishistic, of one kind or another.

Some images record debased approaches to revered symbols, as in a drawing of a punkish young man wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the words "Christ first, then there's wrestling." Elsewhere sex, politics and popular culture are entwined. In one painting the Washington Monument becomes a colossal erection; in another, a man's genitals are transformed, with sunglasses and a strategically placed cigarette, into a Joe Camel face.

The mix of fraternity house humor, gross-out obsession and polymorphous sexuality makes a potent visual combination, particularly as each image is so meticulously wrought, with the drawings more assured technically than the paintings are. There's a lot going on here, and there is no question that

Mr. Hall's adulteration of high art mediums with a determinedly bottom-shelf content is one way to prevent painting and drawing from sinking under the weight of preciousness that made artists look for alternatives in the first place.   HOLLAND COTTER