ART CITIES:Paris-Raymond Pettibon
Influenced by the do-it-yourself aesthetic of album covers and comics of the Southern California punk-rock scene of the late 1970s and 1980s, Raymond Pettibon’s compositions typically pair image and text, with each informing the other in a circular fashion. Raw and immediate, his works have come to occupy their own genre of potent and dynamic artistic commentary, which today remains as relevant as ever.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: David Zwirner Gallery Archive
The work of Raymond Pettibon) follows in the wake of a generation of artists from Los Angeles that includes John Baldessari, Edward Ruscha and Jim Shaw. Along with Paul McCarthy and Mike Kelley, Pettibon is a clear exponent of a type of artistic tradition that originated on the West Coast, under the influence of the confrontation between underground subcultures and the fictions churned out by Hollywood. With its mix of images and words, Pettibon’s work could be said to begin at the point where comic strip illustrators and Pop artists such as Roy Lichtenstein leave off. The sources of his “fictions” (as he calls them) are many and varied: from Goya and Honoré Daumier to the imaginary of television series, magazines and comics, literary references like Marcel Proust, Henry James and William Blake, and pulp fiction. The works on view in his solo exhibition “Frenchette” at David Zwirner Gallery in Paris, feature both entirely new subjects for the artist as well as characters and motifs that Pettibon has returned to often. Recurring figures and themes include Gumby, baseball, US presidents, animals, totalitarian dictators, and waves, among others. In the works depicting Gumby, Pettibon recodes the wide-eyed innocence of the classic children’s television character as strung-out paranoia. One work, “No Title (John Ford directed…)”, shows Gumby wearing a cowboy hat and riding his sidekick, the orange horse Pokey. To the left of the figures, Pettibon has written “John Ford directed: Irish riding the Protestands”, comically merging Gumby with John Wayne, the star of many of Ford’s famous westerns, while injecting the contentious religious opposition between Irish Catholics and Protestants through the symbolism of the colors of green and orange. Several new wave paintings, part of an ongoing series, reach back into the history of abstraction, alluding to the surfaces of abstract expressionist canvases and even the sublime proto-abstract seascapes of J.M.W. Turner. /85Several works feature familiar symbolic forms, such as hearts and globes, which Pettibon transforms into poignant visual emblems. In “No Title (Love the one…)”, one of the artist’s globe drawings, swirls of red, blue, grey, green, white, and yellow comprise the round earth, which sits in an inky black void. Pettibon has inscribed “Love the one you’re with” across the bottom of the sheet. “No Title (It presses with…)” features a mix of drips and rivulets of blue, red, and black that make up a bulging heart with the text “It presses with every throb of consciousness” a quote from Henry James, and “Blue and gray matter” inscribed at the top. ‘Installed in cloud-like clusters across the new Paris gallery space, the exhibition provides a unique opportunity to appreciate the magnitude of Pettibon’s practice.
Info: David Zwirner Gallery, 108 rue Vieille du Temple, Paris, Duration: 16/10-23/11/19, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, www.davidzwirner.com
