Ars Ephemeris

Art Rules

Frieze Magazine Issue 142 October 2011

Art Rules

The things they don’t teach you in art school

As I live through the third recession to take place during my career in the art world I’ve been reflecting on the value of an education in the arts. In his 1762 novel, Emile, Jean Jacques Rousseau sought to design the perfect educational programme for the raising of universal citizens. Does such a thing exist in art education? Let me suggest some rules for young artists and curators to live by that are not taught in art school. Take them or leave them. Use them or abuse them.

1. Art hurts
By this I am not thinking about Chris Burden’s self-crucifixion on the hood of a Volkswagen, Ron Athey performances, or the dramaturgy of professional wrestling. It is possible to have a career in the art world but the odds of making a killing financially are low. Of course this isn’t the reason why people become infatuated with the arts but it is clear that not everyone becomes Andy Warhol, Bono or Andy Kaufman. Upon learning that I had decided against going to law school, my mother (an artist) asked me: ‘How will you support yourself in the manner to which you’re accustomed?’ As I grew up wearing hand-me-downs from my older brothers, a career in the arts was exactly what I needed to support myself in the manner to which I was accustomed. Sometimes it hurts getting there though. The corollary to this rule is the following: learn to wait tables. You will hone your social skills and make some easy cash. In the end those among you who are serious will work your asses off to make it happen. If you can’t wait tables you can always teach. More important artists than you can imagine spent their early years working as guards in world-class museums.

2. Kill your parents
While Sophocles teaches us that killing your parents is a far from productive endeavour, the same cannot be said within the world of culture. A younger generation should be willing and able to overturn the accepted canon, be it curatorial or aesthetic. You should also want my job and be doing everything that you can to get it one day. I would suggest refraining from the tactics of Eve Harrington in the film All About Eve (1950), or Elizabeth Berkeley’s character in Showgirls (1995). No pushing your elders down a flight of stairs please. Killing your parents is just an admonition to get your shit together and take over the world from the complacent generations that came before you.

3. You can learn more in the world than you can in school
I’m sorry if this is disappointing to hear for those of you who are spending tens of thousand of dollars on a graduate education. The point is: your years studying are a luxurious time to read, absorb, obsess, get jaded, experiment with hallucinogens, work on your Twitter feed and so on. However, after spending four years in college and seven on a doctorate and teaching, I learned more about art in one year working at the Walker Art Center than in any school. Working directly with art and artists in institutions is the real art world. Or in galleries. Or in a booth on the Venice boardwalk. Artists: get a job installing art. Art history or curatorial studies grads: beg, borrow, volunteer, or steal your way into a great contemporary art institution. Don’t be shy. Say you’ll do anything (but not in a creepy casting couch kind of way). You have no idea how much we need you but don’t know it yet.

4. Don’t wait for the ‘man’ to come to you
Take Damien Hirst’s first show. The now legendary ‘Freeze’ exhibition was a watershed moment in the emergence of an new generation of British artists in 1988. Hirst and his friends got someone to give them a warehouse space in south-east
London. They installed their work with a professionalism that belied their status as art students. They found a way to get the London art world’s movers and shakers to visit their exhibition and in so doing made
a small dent in art history. Make your own exhibition, start your own magazine, record or mime company. The end of this trajectory does not have to be multi-million dollar skulls encrusted with jewels.
I’m just saying, don’t wait for someone to hand you something.

5. Don’t spend more time networking than making work.
By networking I mean schmoozing, partying, getting in fashion magazines and so on. Cool does not make good work. Hard work makes good work. I recently asked an artist who I was working with whether he was going to take a holiday after our exhibition opened. He told me that he had always felt so fortunate that society allows him to make a living dreaming in his studio that he had a hard time imagining a traditional vacation. The best artists that I’ve ever worked with are so obsessed with their work that the studio is their home and their refuge. Make good work and the rest will come.

6. Have fun
If you’re not having fun doing what you’re doing don’t spend thousands on therapy to figure it out. Take a risk and follow another path. The time you have now is precious. Use it wisely.

7. Live wrong
Repeat this mantra: ‘If that’s wrong then I don’t want to be right.’ Don’t do what is expected of you, do what makes a difference. Ask more questions than you get answers. Plato suggested kicking the poets out of society in The Republic (c.360 bce) because they were too dangerous. There is far too little of the anger of the Sex Pistols, the absurdist outrage of Dada, or the devastating irony of writers like Thomas Pynchon around today. As the world falls apart around us we need young artists, curators, writers, filmmakers and musicians to illuminate our culture as we turn and twist in the widening gyre.

With fond affection while awaiting your act of patricide.

Douglas Fogle

Douglas Fogle is a contributing editor of frieze, and Chief Curator and Deputy Director of Exhibitions and Public Programs at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, USA.

Orgy of colour

Green living … Garden by Howard Hodgkin. Photograph courtesy Gagosian Gallery

Everyone will be struck by the boldness, scale and exhilarating freedom of many of the paintings in Howard Hodgkin’s new show. None of these qualities is new to him: he has been making very large paintings much more frequently over the past eight years, and some of them, such as the huge unframed Rhode Island (2000-02), have been very wildly painted, as if he were out of patience with the seductiveness and refinement he so naturally commands. He has just completed a quartet of paintings that seem to tap into the same American freedom, and take their titles from a song that is a kind of unofficial anthem of the American west. But the familiar words of “Home on the Range” have elicited from Hodgkin something no one could have anticipated: a sequence that moves from the terrain of his art as we think we know it towards the most radical experiment he has yet made.

It begins with another big fierce landscape, Home, Home on the Range, which reminds you that “home” may be far from homely - and perhaps, in Hodgkin’s own case, far from home; he was evacuated from England to the United States at the age of eight, a dislocation that also gave him his first direct contact with much of the greatest modern art, and showed him the necessity of becoming an artist himself. This new painting was started seven years ago, and shares something of the roughness and restless agitation of Rhode Island. Similar dashes in red and brilliant cadmium yellow flicker in the foreground; the framing effects, like theatre flats, with which Hodgkin frequently structures a painting, are impetuously painted over; the sky is hectic and hurrying, the colour contrasts powerful and unsettling. In many of his paintings, Hodgkin famously works with a found frame, which is then lavishly painted over. They intoxicate by being all paint, and even on the smallest scale can overwhelm you with their refusal of conventional distance and distraction. But increasingly now he is leaving the bare board clear, as the ground of the painting itself, and as the margin in which the business of the picture raggedly stops or starts. Your attention is still drawn to the means and the medium, but in a different way.

Where the Deer and the Antelope Play is a gentler painting, and a simpler one. Long lines of underdrawing left visible mark a horizon between a gorgeously flaming sky and a yellow-green sweep of prairie so intense that the eye almost flinches from it. Sumptuous dark blues provide a kind of proscenium for a primitively idyllic scene. The deer and the antelope themselves must be imagined - this is merely where they play. And the sense of play expands in the jubilant third panel. The quaint phrasing of the song allows that a discouraging word may occasionally be heard, but the few dark accidentals in Hodgkin’s version are swept away in a dance of unstoppable energy, the colouring of Matisse-like simplicity, a dazzle of blue dashes above rolling swathes of yellow and orange. Where Seldom Is Heard a Discouraging Word gives form to the Romantic notion of a landscape smiling, even to the hymnist’s notion that the valleys laugh and sing.

And what then? The fourth movement is not a symphonic finale, but a kind of dissolution, a painting all in one colour - or, more strictly, in two, since so much of the pale board that the green paint flashes across is left bare and contributes its own tone of faintly gleaming vacancy. In fact, for all these paintings, each nearly seven feet high and nine feet wide, two boards are joined together. In And the Skies Are Not Cloudy All Day, most of the action is in the upper half, the paint scurrying and gathering towards the right, while down below a couple of dozen dashes of paint leap and tumble across empty space. The painting gives a sense of headlong speed in the execution, a masterly scribble. It is different in character from Cy Twombly’s scribbles, but it has a comparable sense of almost haphazard sublimity. If part of the vividness of this sequence comes from Hodgkin’s memories, in old age, of his American boyhood, a passionate backward glance, then its final panel is all the more remarkable for the lack of any sense of recapitulation. It moves on; and it is very hard to see where, beyond total silence, it could go next. It is the end, at least of this particular song.

The paintings of Hodgkin’s 70s often have a turbulence, capturing and taking animation from movement and flux, that was perhaps less evident, less urgent, in earlier years, when he seemed more bent on the patient stalking of memory and feeling. Those characteristic blobs or dashes, which seemed to camouflage the very thing they were describing, may now be the sole kind of mark in an entire painting. In his biggest ever work on board, Autumn (1998-2003), the blobs had become leaves, half-concealing the landscape as they streamed across it on the wind. The painting’s relative simplicity of structure and means enhanced the metaphysical power we feel more and more strongly in late Hodgkin. His recent interest in pairs, or even quartets, of paintings strengthens this visionary strain through grand thematic contrasts. Four years ago, there were two great paintings in identical formats, Come Into the Garden, Maud and Undertones of War, one an exuberantly floral vision of love, the other the most brutal and angry painting Hodgkin has ever done. Both were full of movement, whether revelling and free or relentless and stabbing. Together they were complete, and irresolvable.

The new show contains another pair, of comparable magnificence, House and Garden, made entirely out of blobs on a dark ground. (I’m aware that “blob”, “dot” and “dash” are crudely inadequate terms for one of Hodgkin’s most complex and individual kinds of mark.) They use to the full a pair of very broad and deep, perhaps 1930s frames, stained a rich deep brown, and slightly warped in a way that lends them a further twist of energy. House is painted all in reds and oranges, a tremendous storm or swarm of dots, as dense as humanity in its migrations, its collisions and overlappings. The central board can’t help but seem an opening, or portal, through which the richly coloured motes swirl and stream. The house, as if read by a thermal-imaging camera, glows with occupation, activity, the incessant comings and goings of the moment and of the years. Garden is clearer, more regular in its marks, an airier realm where nature delights but is kept in order, and yet rebels. The frame has the colour of moist earth, against which the yellow and green dashes take on almost luminous intensity. Across the centre, there is movement among the leaves, and the forms blur sexily, in a kind of pollenous smear. There is another Hodgkin called Garden, painted 45 years earlier, a nearly symmetrical view through an archway; and gardens have made subjects of many different moods and implications for him since. But there has never been one so radically simple or so vitally mysterious.

You always want to get close to a Hodgkin. The sensory, sometimes visceral impact of a painting when first seen is followed by a long, evolving negotiation with it, a move into intimate reverie and speculation. The marks he makes, often with a large brush heavily laden with different-coloured paints, are among the great virtuosities of modern art. Their immediacy and bravura strike you from across a room, but as you get closer and closer they draw you in to what seem little landscapes in themselves, yielding up greater and greater riches, and even giving a slightly hallucinatory sense of their being other paintings within the painting, a sort of dreamlike double take. Instinct and spontaneity are at one with inexpressible mystery.

Exactly how it is done, day by day or year by year, is itself a mystery to most of us. It would be fascinating to watch the growth of a painting over several years, the occasional removal of the screens with which works in progress are concealed in the studio, as if perhaps to spare them the abrasions of familiarity, and to foment them in the imagination; then the pondered but surely rapid additions, the undisguised overpainting that lends so many Hodgkins a further sense of mystery, of semi-concealment in layers. Occasionally in the past a painting has been exhibited, revised and then exhibited again; anyone with access to the catalogue raisonné can compare the versions and glimpse something of the process.

Hodgkin can be all candour, nakedly emotional, and at the same time leave you guessing. Something essentially intuitive in his art expects intuition in the viewer. His art seduces, but partly by flattering you with the confidence that you will be quick and keen enough to respond: it works by a kind of erotic certainty. You can feel teased by a Hodgkin, your interest piqued, your curiosity titillated. His subjects, of course, often are erotic, flushed with amorous feeling and refinements of feeling. “Privacy and Self-Expression in the Bedroom”, in the new show, has an unmissably Hodgkin title (which is also, amusingly, a found title: a chapter heading from a 1950 book on interior decoration). The painting itself is warmly expressive, and also pretty private, visibly drawing a veil over the rich-hued life within; and playing, like so many Hodgkins, with the paradoxical implications of scale: an intimate subject, which might have made for one of his intense small paintings, given a treatment five feet wide. The mind zooms in and out as it thinks the thing through.

The uncertain thresholds of intimacy are treated very wittily in the new painting Blushing. It is a pair to Degas’ Russian Dancers, a darker painting of the same size, which is perhaps a memory, or vividly transformed sense-impression, of Degas’s pastel in the National Gallery, itself an “orgy of colour”, in Degas’s own phrase, and from his late career. Now the dancer’s skirt swings in a heavy orange-and-black diagonal across the board, a form like a flaming Zeppelin sinking right off the edge of the frame. In Blushing, however, the diagonal form is slightly curved, one of Hodgkin’s big right-hand arcs, and, far from sinking, it is perkily and irrepressibly tumescent. Its background is a happy stirring of pink blobs over paler pink streaks, giving a sense of simultaneous delight and confusion. A blush, after all, is a sign of a secret, a rushing to the surface of something hidden but no longer deniable, though to us as viewers its cause may still need to be guessed at. The frame the artist has chosen is especially apt and suggestive: an unfinished one, partly traced over with a conventional pattern of flowing foliage, as a guide for the wood carver, who has made the first shallow etching-out of the shapes along the top edge, but has as yet left the left-hand edge virtually untouched. The paint makes almost no incursion on to the frame, so that the sensitive subject appears contained within a structure which is itself only partly defined, a matter of decorous gestures that the suffusion of blushing challenges but does not yet break free of.

Hodgkin has long been alone in his command of such nuances, and shows no sign of abandoning his recherche of emotional truths, in all their elusiveness and contrariety. What shakes you is that at 75, when many artists fall victim to their own habits, good or bad, he should also be making work so recklessly and unanswerably new.

· Howard Hodgkin’s exhibition of new paintings is at the Gagosian Gallery, Britannia Street, London WC1, from April 3 to May 17.

• © 2011 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

Disjecta Membra

(In which we spill wine and discuss the passion of Guy Peppin, painter and poet.) 
by A. Porter Berger

I remember my first meeting with the artist well. I’d been invited by a mutual friend to an afternoon tea at the Sydney studio of Guy Peppin. Fumbling in my pocket for my buzzing phone, I’d dropped drink on the floor – the glass exploding on the concrete and spattering my legs with red wine. Seeing how devastated I was by this mess, he tossed his own glass to join it, patting me on the back, observing that “it’s not a party until somebody breaks something!” adding “perhaps it can be a libation to the gods of the studio? ” This certainly demonstrates Peppin’s generosity of spirit, his warmth, easy enthusiasm and joyful subversiveness. He abounded with joie de vivre, that sense that life as a privilege, and the earth as something splendid to walk on. He makes his art with the power and liberty of Americans 50 years ago, I was moved by the scope of Peppin’s work, with it’s emotional waterfalls of colour. His art is tearful, sensual, pessimistic, and on the edge of bad taste. Yet everything he does – no matter how lofty, every squished crimson bloom or crush of dark undergrowth, allows itself to be pulled back, sucked down, underwater, into the swamp, into the past.  

Guy Peppin Mascarene 2011 

“Perhaps it can be a libation to the gods of the studio?”

The past is Peppin’s passion, his family’s story is rich and historic; but unlike many he refuses to mine it for his own work. He could be making paintings about the important story of the (Peppin) Merino Sheep, and “have an art show in half the towns in Australia,” but he’s not interested in pandering to his country’s notorious philistinism. He said something truthful - along the lines of: “people in Australia still unconsciously hear the word ‘Loser’ when the see the word ‘Artist.’In most countries creative people are revered, or at least respected, Australia is the only place where I have found where people to be openly hostile to them.Peppin has a distaste of what called be termed self-conscious-bohemianism, “inverted snobbery drives me crazy… avant garde discomfort, I can’t stand the hipster-ish embrace-of and comfort-in-failure.” he went on to say “a couple of people at art school once accused me of being too Bourgeois – whatever that means… maybe I am. But I think it was really jealousy masquerading as social awareness, I was getting top marks for assignments, and I already had a small market for my work - and I was also having a lot of fun! - not suffering! All this, to somebody like that is completely unforgivable!” He went on to say that “art history shows what we know, but can’t really bear to acknowledge - that mythic bohemian underclass. most successful artists were always from what we now classify as an upper to middle class background, Michaelangelo, Degas, Toulouse-Lautrec… Gauguin, Van Gough, Picasso etcetera… I ventured that Tracy Emin pretends to be working class, but; where money is concerned, she’s basically a Tory. “the recipe for success is imagination + talent… but they’re nothing without the dynamic ingredient: confidence.”

Guy Peppin Marsyas 2011

“The recipe for success is imagination + talent…
but they’re nothing without the dynamic ingredient: confidence.”

He reminded me of something that Andy Warhol once said in an interview: “Nothing is more bourgeois than to be afraid to look bourgeois.” I’ve always suspected that a lot of artists secretly want to be able to afford to move to big houses in the suburbs, but they would never dare admit it.Peppin came to are in a round-a-bout way, he had something like a quarter life crisis, dropped his career as a successful graphic designer and enrolled to study at the National Art School in Sydney “art school was the best thing I’ve ever decided to do. I’d had enough… and I fled from demanding clients and unrealistic deadlines and computers.” Peppin was discovered in his graduating year at NAS by the collector and international talent manager James Erskine (of SEL, Sports and Entertainment Limited), and Peppin now regularly shows at Liverpool Street Gallery (www.liverpoolstreetgallery.com) in East Sydney. Peppin has never mentioned this to me, but I know through a mutual acquaintance that he mentored many undergraduate students when he was still at university, encouraging them in their darker moments to stay-on.  

 
Guy Peppin Fragminis 2009 

Peppin grew up on the Northern Beaches of Sydney, 45 minutes up the coast from the city at Collaroy Beach with its crumbling deco cinema and P&O style apartment buildings. The sea is often referenced in his work. And the linear horizon is as omnipresent there as it is in this paintings and drawings. Much of his early work was painted on the deep verandahs of his family’s home, a historic wooden beach house occupying a hill overlooking the Indian Ocean. You could perhaps say that Guy Peppin seems quite un-Australian, he has spent a large amount of time overseas, mostly in the US and on the Continent – this makes him even more of an outsider, an exile perhaps more at home among the antiquities of Europe. He is a man who is somewhat dirty-minded, and history-minded. Somehow, the two go together into a genius of decay and fragmented memories. His nervous, supremely elegant and often very beautiful art is not as well known as it might be. Currently many critics steeled by fashionable art, that candy-hit of Pop-Surrealism and the provincial media circus of Australian art prizes; like the Archibald. They ignore Peppin’s effulgent paintings.

But to his admirers he is a visual poet, a thinking person’s artist steeped in culture and classical literature, making it new with his painting. The literary influence is not surprising, throughout his student days he worked at, and ran second-hand bookshops, including Shakespeare & Co in Paris and the iconic and much loved Ampersand Cafe Bookstore in Sydney’s Paddington. It’s very easy to imagine him spending time surrounded by books, the great dusty piles surrounding him. Privately he also writes astounding poetry, some of which he which he grudgingly let me read.


Again, on a wild and burning shore,
deep with salt and thick with weeds,
swept-up, beached and beckoned,
by an unseen moon, unreasonable winds
and waves tug at jetsam; like all waves,
and push towards those fatal shores,
what fortunate gales will have me
surging on those scattered coral sands
bleached and broken by underlining currents,
I will write to you in wind and running waters,
shooting at the sky to free a firmament,
while night seas, stars and storms glisten,
swing and batter; as I, long foam bordered,
sky driven and sea blown, drift and sunder
in waves, coming and going on gleaning tides,
again drawn-out beyond depth, clutching
flotsam fragments to wilder shores.
                                            - from Wilder Shores 2010

His own art is full of words; both visible and erased, which ache to express the totality of what he wants to say. Quoting poetry; even if it is your own, is somewhat ostentatious, and yet to actively write down a piece of poetry is to feel it for the first time.

(Abstraction) “I felt it had to be earned
by learning traditional skills like drawing first.”

 

Peppin follows the news every day, he believes that Abstract art is what’s needed as a response to the violence around us. And he did not come easily into abstraction, “I felt it had to be earned by learning traditional skills like drawing first.” He also said that perhaps “abstract art is needed now because it can be a vessel of humanity and sensitivity, which it shields from the lies and violence of our age.” I tend to agree with him, in that poetry is a better response to these times than propaganda. Each work is a moment of crisis, each one risks failure, the works are anxious with a Greekness, a kind of philosophical abstraction of thought. The unassuming abandon with which he smears is playful, yet melancholic, like letting fall a handful of Autumn leaves on a windy day, his choice of colours is tinged with saudade, an almost indescribable yearning sadness and acceptance. They are transcendently arcane on the one hand, yet so peculiarly illiterate on the other, from funereal depths to the ecstatic climax of their tragic intensity. The colours in his recent 2011 exhibition at Liverpool Street Gallery are those of overripe fruit, flowers squashed or about to fade, spilled blood or wine, are all impossibly heady and enjoyable. When I was in his studio I spied a discarded sketch sitting crumpled in the trash, it required every ounce of self control not to rescue it when his back was turned. I missed out on acquiring a work from his exhibition. Collectors and fans are quietly acquiring his work, even in these difficult times.  

Guy Peppin The Julii 2009

…the works are anxious with a Greekness,
a kind of philosophical abstraction of thought. 

I found Peppin quite reserved in his manner, and I sensed he was concealing deep emotions. He has endearing integrity, vulnerability and emotional freedom, but there was nothing precious or boring about him. As a type of artist, Peppin closely approximates the classic dandy - always impenetrable and impossible to pin down. Peppin is very hardworking, without being one of those humourlessly earnest characters. I find him provocative, but at the same time he probably couldn’t care less. This freedom; suggests to me that Peppin isn’t worried about pleasing other people or his work being any good, he simply loves making it - and the studio is a private crucible where he is happiest. Standing in his studio, he seemed to me quite like an acrobat, walking that fine line between elegance and chaos, celebration and grief… a slippery figure, not quite of our time - yet not of any other. Red wine splashed on the floor - was even more beautiful than in a glass, it was love - impossible without violence.Peppin is a rare spirit - out of time, but his subject is time, and it’s evanescent passing - and also what it leaves behind. In his pictures images and words seem to survive at random, like a tideline, or pools of memory that experience washes-over but does not quite erase.  

Guy Peppin Mirror for Bacchus 2011

…he seemed to me quite like an acrobat,
walking that fine line between elegance and chaos,
celebration and grief… a slippery figure,
not quite of our time - yet not of any other. 

Tall and slim, with blond hair and blue eyes, he has something of what could be described as that hypnotic, deity-like face of the iconic actor Tilda Swinton. Handsome and casually elegant, he was dressed in an old pair of paint stained studio jeans and sneakers, but also wearing a beautifully-cut jacket and a Breguet watch. To me, he appeared a gentleman from the waist-up, a savage from the waist-down. I found him strikingly reminiscent of Ingres’s drawing of the young Franz Liszt, a print of which I remember fondly from my parent’s house. He had a negligent, almost savage grace, a whiff of mischief and a charming insouciance about him. He spoke to me in a soft accent and a slight stutter. I came to realise later, that his reticence, and his grave good manners went hand in hand with shyness. In discussion with another guest I found out that last year the fashion designer Nicola Finetti designed a couture dress based on Peppin’s work.

 Nicola Finetti’s Peppin Dress

  

On the table in his studio was a big paint-spattered tin bucket filled with flowers, there was a pot of tea and another bucket crammed with wine, and there was also the most delicious food. Had Peppin lived a century ago, he might have been a model for a character in a novel by E. M. Forster or Evelyn Waugh - the kind of bohemian aristocrat figure that is no longer being written, but still much adored. Living well for Peppin is not an affectation, it’s style. Having completely forgotten my clumsy mishap we discussed history, and he talked easily and knowledgeably about a widely varied number of subjects.

Guy Peppin Severen (life is crazy) 2009 

He had a negligent, almost savage grace,
that ‘whiff’ of mischief and a charming
insouciance about him.

Uncertainty is a powerful thing once you embrace it. And it seems to me that candid flailing always proves wear far better than the aggressive certainties of most fame-seeking artists, which, when they do not attain the deathless clarity of masterpieces; that is, nearly all the time, tend to become embarrassingly dated with the next turnover of artistic fashion. Peppin’s best works are always permanently embroiled in the present tense of their making; they would be just as fresh if created today or tomorrow. These canvasses are battlegrounds, and it’s evident that desire for Peppin is a war. In this sense, he is exactly like his hero Cy Twombly, or Jackson Pollock. As a painter Peppin is as ritualistic and frenzied as his predecessors, but by accepting the discipline of culture, i.e. of classical literature and myth, he acknowledges a tradition outside his raging self. This is not sublimation, or repression, it is simply the acknowledgment that art is within culture, it is sharing. So that even the most brutal painted mark assumes a system of meaning. Peppin transposes his dilemmas, his inordinate sensuality, his insatiability, on to a luxurious territory sprawling over centuries and millennia. In this sense he is like an old master, and his work seals with the vast sweep of history and mythology, yet makes it intimate and personal - I love his work immensely. He has everything: sex, graffiti, baroque energy and seductive beauty. As a person, and as an artist is an original, i.e. a genius.

 
Guy Peppin Auntie Venus 2009

These canvasses are battlegrounds,
and it’s evident that desire for Peppin is a war.

When you look at his works, that are at once brave, abstract and literary, demand to be read while also being hard, perhaps impossible to read. This is a painter who creates a work like Auntie Venus, and invokes the old gods as living presences. The culture Peppin has chosen is classical in the largest sense, including the writers and poets who have gone to to Europe, the painters who have painted it - most of all, Poussin and Turner - and the history of the Mediterranean world. He utilises a complex visual vocabulary to link his own biographical experiences to classic mythology, creating an endless discourse via his melting scrawl, a uniquely abstruse sinuous language in painting. This makes him sound difficult, and he is, but his work has a sensuality that is immediately, humanly rewarding.His art belongs mostly to itself, while retaining passing affinities to many different and contrary directions in art since 1945. You can look harshly and say this is just a raft of stupidities and inanities, a palimpsest of the half-begun and never-completed. But his art feels rich and urgent, if only you could work out what the secret was, or how to decipher it. In Peppin’s work you will find scribbles, great looping calligraphies of white on black, of white on white. His paintings are a mass of marks, erasures and words, when they are almost dry he tears them into strips and layers them out of order in an effort of almost personal iconoclasm. He freely admits that he ends up destroying a great number of his paintings, by re-working over the top.Their tottering layers of colour are like encountering floating islands in fog, with streams and rivulets of colour volcanically erupting in a huge empty void. They are precious, intense and vulnerable, erotic and violent. He has a European sense of the erased, the partial, the lost and the fragmentary that makes complete sense to me. He is a painter of thinking aloud, of thoughts checked and then resumed, hesitancies and then rush of ideas. Everything is always anxious in his hands, being made and unmade.

Guy Peppin Home Over Water 2011

They are precious,
intense and vulnerable,
erotic and violent.

Looking at Peppin’s works up-close, catching changing light, or when you approach the painting from the side. His finger-pawings on the surface announce that the artist was here too - in person. Somewhere else, perhaps Peppin has used the canvas to wipe the rest of the paint from his fingers. Everything is a gesture, but also an utterance, a sign, a touch. Peppin knows how to deal with emptiness, with pauses and blankness, the painter’s silence. A painting can be an accumulation of impetuous rushes, but a painter can also stop and sit on his hands. His is sometimes an act of desecration or vandalisation, of bringing the language of abstract expressionism out of the realm of personal expression and into the world of writing and language. Peppin’s mysterious paintings are contrary to much of art history, by which I mean that instead of trying to draw you in they actively try to keep you out. Their evocative and tantalising titles tease you like an overheard snippet of conversation in the street, then they leave you in the lurch. There are works of an infinite dimension, they open up the canvas, beyond the second dimension into the third dimension. They are like wooden clap-board walls of a beach-house (weather-board as they are sometimes called in Australia) or closed Venetian blinds, closed to the exterior world, providing what is perhaps now a great luxury, privacy. 

Everything is a gesture,
but also an utterance,
a sign, a touch. 

Peppin is a scholarly painter who talks unaffectedly about Poussin, and about the poetry of Rilke, Catallus and Homer. But also about Patricia Highsmith, Robert Lowell and Alan Hollinghurst, all writers whose subtlety and delicacy underline their worldliness, violences and humour.Phrases come and go, lines are repeated until they become incantatory. Sometimes you read a fragmentary part of a poem, or an allusion to a classical text, only for it to be crossed out. There are puns and odd misspellings: erudition giving way to playful doodling. And this is what I love: the way that there is slippage between an intended epic expression and a failure to finish.His art mirrors its amazing mix of high and low, grand and grotesque, beautiful and corrupt, it could be a shopping list or an epic poem. He is one of the the few artists that I know of today who works naturally in a kind of critical conversation with the greats of art history, casually mixing the demotic language of the street with erudite allusion. This literariness is something that tells against him, in Australia.

Guy Peppin Le Hussard sue le Toit 2011

His art mirrors it’s amazing mix of high and low,
grand and grotesque, beautiful and corrupt.

Peppin’s art is fervently, tenderly, and even comically romantic, but also elegiac or pleasurably mournful. It relishes gaudy, dangerously exposed and emotional language, with words written loosely using graphite on the canvas – as graffiti, or more correctly ‘Sgraffitto,’ but of the most literate and gentlemanly kind, steeped in the classics. He feeds on the past, history, archaeology, myth. His words and gestures become defiant skid-marks on the face of time.Like Turner, whose melting body-shaking light Peppin cites in some of his smaller works, uses the sense of time conveyed by the moods of nature to suggest historical seasons and inevitable transformations: the rise and fall of empires, the making and destruction of human power, the wars of love. Artists like this matter now, because they make monumental historical art at a time of pervasive amnesia. Growth and collapse are fundamental to this art: history as erection, expenditure and then fall. This is his sweeping scope – decline and loss, and a consciousness of that which must pass.

His paintings are not easel paintings, their making claims the rooms they had inhabited and later are installed in. They draw a cognitive frame around the ambient space. Like some of his heroes Peppin applies large swaths of canvas directly to the walls or floor; he then covers them in writing, doodles and scribbles, the canvas is an incidental surface to be later cut-away, detached, shredded, mounted or framed as the work. The paintings, created in this way are fragments of rooms and places that Peppin has passed through are personal, like studied sketchbook pages, or polaroid snapshots.

  
Guy Peppin Standing Sun I-IV 2011

He feeds on the past, history, archaeology, myth.
Words and gestures become skid-marks on the face of time.

Peppin shares with Twombly and Rauschenberg a propensity for coded autobiography and a taste for the impure, the complicated - and they all have a poetic sense of history. But where Rauschenberg and other contemporaries turned to collage, assemblages from Pop culture, an architecture of dense quotation, Peppin, has followed Twombly, who allowed only one impurity into his paintings: writing. Writing is implied in the marks and scrawls of abstract expressionist painting - Pollock even called one of his early pictures Stenographic Figure – but in art history it took Twombly to replace the spontaneous mark with the written word. His words are passionate, but as language they are also received: he did not invent the word happiness. So the declared spontaneity and the unauthorised, savage originality of American art is replaced, quite casually, in Twombly and now in Peppin with an insistence on the historical nature of art, without becoming sedate. 
Guy Peppin Floris Belli 2011

Peppin’s art is an adventure that he’s embarked on, it’s a voyage to some painterly Arcadian place where uncontrollable feelings, experience, expectation, dreams, and love become one. This juxtaposition of life and death is finely balanced in every mark: the paint breathes with life. Looking, I am taken into unknown territory that is then made immediately familiar. His mixture of intimacy and grandeur, force and delicacy, creates a sexy dynamism, a beauty that is an erotic perception of time and shape.For Peppin, abstraction allows him to truly represent life, perhaps as Patti Smith said, to begin “thinking between my legs.” This is what I like most about this artist, Peppin is clearly thinking with his brain, his heart and from between his legs. I wish Guy Peppin a long life, and all the best.

A. Porter Berger is based in New York. Copyright 2011.