Peter Blake: Rock, Paper, Scissors - Waddington Custot Galleries, review Rock, Paper, Scissors. A timeless child's game. It doesn't quite conjure the plastic pop culture, adverts, celebrities, music sleeves, bold, cartoonish arrow targets and collected ephemera that is synonymous with Peter Blake's work. In a typically contrary inversion of Pop Art's principles the title of Blake's latest show is a tribute to his materials, to his craft. The show features old pieces, among them Roxy Roxy (1965-83), his wonderful portrait-icon of a female wrestler, and a charming selection of watercolours from his college days that show his early interest in funfairs, fantasy and playful humour. But there's a substantial collection of new works too, including a series of collages that recall the aesthetic of Blake's famous design of the Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band cover, which fetched more than £50,000 at auction last week. None of the new collages reference modern life, or pop culture. Instead of the Fred Astaires, John Lennons, and Marilyn Monroes, he uses kitschy cut-outs of rosy-cheeked children, superheroes, and butterflies taken from old illustrated books. What is interesting is that, as Blake's instantly-recognisable Pop aesthetic has aged, the artist himself has retreated further and further from modern reality into childhood. Blake is now 80 and he has done the artist's equivalent to donning an eccentric old hat, allowing himself to turn his back on whatever else may be going on in the world. He has stopped paying homage to young artists in his work, and has stopped worrying about the financially-obsessed contemporary art market. He no longer follows the latest movements in art world. No, he would much rather be in his studio, playing with his toys. It suits him. His new sculptures are surreal, playful, irreverent and often baffling. They're mostly compiled of toy figurines, and have narratives: a family of toys is trapped in a crumbling turret of a castle; a plastic Snow White enters the lexicon of Surrealism as she is ushered into a garden of surrealist art historical delights. The best, though, is "A Parade For Saul Steinberg" (2007-12) which unites Hulk Hogan, Bugs Bunny, The Simpsons, toy cars and many others in a glass box coffin, a lively jamboree consigned to a stuffily antiquated future. It's like finding your old summer holiday games arcade in the National History Museum. Blake's work, at its best, has always had a melancholic tinge to it. Some of his early 1956 collages, also in this show, feature silver paper of the sort that used to wrap Kit-Kats, next to torn crepe, worn card, stained canvas, and yellowed newspaper. While poles apart from the new toy "Parade," it's all part of the same vocabulary: the fragile promise of something shiny and new somehow spoiled by time and age. The last painting that you see on the left hand side of the door as you leave the show is a haunting little 2010 figurative watercolour of Oliver Twist holding a bowl to the viewer, asking for more. Blake has often said that his drive to collect and create stems from a childhood that was lost to the war. Like a fairground trinket, "Oliver Twist" feels like a cheap parting shot. If Blake is still hungry to play, he certainly doesn't need to spell it out to us. Until 15 December