Peter Gallo’s first solo show on the West Coast—Peter Gallo: Gods, Sluts & Martyrs—is on view at Adams and Ollman in Portland’s Pearl District through May 10th. This body of work waxes deliciously indulgent, even in its most rough and ready forms, drawing disparities together through aesthetic rigor. The title of the exhibition itself begs unusual associations, hinting that the archetypes of god, slut, and martyr might not be so far departed from one another as their nomenclature and historical framing would suggest. 

I happened to meet Gallo, who is a gentle and soft spoken person, on my initial visit to the exhibition. During our exchange, I learned that he keeps his works around him at his home in Vermont, allowing them to evolve for years before showing them publicly. Gallo crafted these pieces on rough wooden surfaces, using layers upon layers of paint applied to muslin, linen, or canvas. Some have the tenor of handmade signage or street art, containing brief words or phrases. Others contain figurative imagery. Most pieces are hung in the gallery, save for a couple that sat upright on a chair and on the floor. His works cohere through their peculiar tactility, emerging in rich red, powder blue, soft pink and violet, and pops of vibrant green. 

Gallo’s work Possessions, created between 2023-2025, features images of Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s seventeenth-century sculpture of St. Teresa—red and grayscale photocopies of her face, portrayed in a state of spiritual and orgasmic ecstasy, pasted many times over in all different orientations. This work also contains swaths of red and white fabric, stapled harshly in horizontal lines to the plywood and buffered by St. Theresa’s ecstatic heads. I cannot help but see this work as a subversive and deeply punk Valentine. It speaks to Catholicism’s promise of rapturous joy coupled with institutional violence, gesturing to the way that the Catholic Church has historically lorded over the intersection of carnal experience and artistic production. 

Philosophizing & Crying (no date) contains two linked rings painted in caked and dripping layers of white paint on canvas and stapled to a panel. The left hand ring is inscribed with “Philosophizing” and the right hand is inscribed with “Crying” in wavering hues of blue, black and grey. Though rugged, this work reads almost like a contemporary meme, pulling together intellectual and emotional experience without prioritizing one over the other.

Theory Disgust (2024) contains another duality. This work, constructed on panel and found wood, presents a continuum, like an abstract digestive stretching from the top to the bottom of a baby blue torso, with two concave ends. At the top of the tract, the word “THEORY” is extruded white paint, and, toward the bottom of the painting, reads the word “DISGUST.” Between these words lies a figurative spinal cord, protruding from below layers of blue paint. By placing “theory” at the uppermost edge of the painting, Gallo conjures notions of the mind, spirit, and all that is closest to God; “Disgust,” on the other hand, lives near the bottom of the painting, calling up references to anal refuse and pleasure deemed abject. This continuity between “theory” and “disgust” suggests the words have some cause and effect relationship, running either direction.

One of Gallo’s works reads “BEUYS+” in deep red over bright red, painted across two green Time/Life book covers—the spines of which read something about “The Forest” and the “History of the United States.” This work appears to reference the famed 20th century artist Joseph Beuys. 

I am not an art historian, but I do know that Beuys is a slippery figure in the canon of 20th Century artists, known for his lore and self-mythologizing prowess that contributed to his lasting legacy. I also know he volunteered for the Luftwaffe and harbored a fraught early history with Nazi Germany, tainting his canonical status, which is of note especially given the recent rise of fascist policy in the US and Europe. Beuys presence brings up the political horseshoe (another continuum) along with a question: If he were alive today, would he hold true to his espoused concern for the environment, his anarchic teaching methods and ardent experimentation? Or would he slide back into the arms of fascism if it were more advantageous for him to do so? Of course, though worth asking, this question is impossible to answer. Beuys remains a shape-shifting figure—much like the god, the slut, and the martyr—and his status as an art legend lies wholly in the eye of the beholder. 

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For Violets Violets Violets (E. Dickinson) (2016-2025), Gallo caked layers upon layers of oil paint onto wood panels. Like the other bits of text in his paintings, Gallo has extruded a bit of script onto the work using a hypodermic needle. It reads “violets violets violets” in shaky white paint. He calls on the imagery of the violet used by Emily Dickinson in her poems, smearing a gradient of pinks, blues, and purples on the wood panel to tease the pleasing tone of violet in this work. Dickinson’s appearance here, in such a wobbly and unhinged presentation, also calls to mind her poem *Much Madness is divinest Sense – (620), touching into the disparities explored in Gallo’s work:

“Much Madness is divinest Sense –

To a discerning Eye –

Much Sense – the starkest Madness -” 

I learned upon looking into Gallo’s history that he holds years of experience as a service coordinator and psychiatric crisis support worker for folks with developmental and psychiatric Disabilities, and he also possesses an robust academic background in art history—career counterpoints that draw the exhibition in a particular light. Peter Gallo: Gods, Sluts & Martyrs seems to explore the cognitive dissonance threading through categorical separations in its title, offering an aesthetic edge on which the viewer can consider connection amidst what is typically understood as disparity. Hearkening back to Dickinson’s reflections on madness and divine sense, this show seems to ask: how does one reconcile the social forces that frame artistic production with the most carnal, emotional, and visceral human experiences that drive its creation? 

Peter Gallo: Gods, Sluts & Martyrs will be on view at Adams and Ollman Gallery through May 10. The gallery is located at 418 NW 8th Avenue in Portland and is open Wednesday through Saturday, 11am–5pm.