On Epi

His early works began to appear in the early 2000’s on walls around central Paris, where he was a student- stencilled quotations taken from those seminal works of the French literary repertoire he was discovering in his studies. Rather than the widespread acclaim and adulation he had hoped for, his efforts earned him near-universal condemnation and opprobrium, not to mention the ire of the Gendarmerie Nationale.

Heavily influenced by the Stencil Movement that had its roots in 1960’s Parisian political protest art, Epi later returned to Britain and adapted his artistic style, eschewing wall for canvas to appropriate and recapitulate tropes from the canon of contemporary art in his own inimitable- and oft-derided- style, fusing multifarious artistic techniques into a strange amalgamation that he likes to term- somewhat loftily- ‘Destructivism’ or- more simplistically- “taking other people’s work and fucking with it.”

At the heart of Epi’s work lies a deeply-held disdain for the gaggle of preening narcissists and arrivistes that loosely constitutes the traditional contemporary art establishment- whose ignorance, pretentiousness and capriciousness he has long found abhorrent- along with an unwavering desire to subvert the very métier he is so desperate to forge a career in.

So far his efforts have, for some inexplicable reason, found popularity amongst a host of esteemed and celebrated contemporary art collectors, or so Epi keeps insisting. Rumours have circulated that Larry Gagosian owns two of Epi’s works, but these are most likely apocryphal, if not complete fabrications put about by Epi himself in a sad and pathetic attempt to garner interest in his work.

Whilst at first glance Epi’s work may appear superficially low brow and juvenile, he repeatedly insists that he is actually engaged in a highly nuanced intellectual game of call and response- akin to Bertolt Brecht’s practice of ‘Dramatic Alienation’- with the entire canon of contemporary art itself. By reducing to absurdity familiar and beloved contemporary works, artistic tropes, and their progenitors- that are, in Epi’s view, inherently facile and pointless but are still lauded as valuable and significant by an art crowd he views as capricious and philistinic- he hopes to expose and erode the pretensions of those would would posit contemporary art as anything more than the overhyped and often-meaningless drivel that in reality it probably is.

It is that singular credo that Epi believes bestows value upon his work: not only do his works require a comparable level of technical ability to replicate the original works they intend to satirize, but a further level of conceptual depth and satirical meaning must be conceived of and worked into the piece in a way that subtly elucidates the shortcomings of the original itself. His works mimic others, and then- to Epi’s mind at least- intellectually supersede them. Many, however, strongly disagree with his own assessment of his work.

Rather than working as an artist, Epi’s approach is rather an academic and conceptual one, casting him primarily as an art critic who happens to make art; a subversion of established creative practice that he believes serves to expose the collective delusion under which such large swathes of the art market labour.

Epi endeavours to bring his work into the reach of a broad base of art buyers- tiering the primary pricing structure for his open and limited edition prints, as well as original canvases, according to his own assessment of each piece’s individual brilliance and ingenuity, so that people on every rung of the socioeconomic ladder can afford a piece of his work. This benevolent approach to selling his work, however, will undoubtedly change when his art starts going for really serious money, whereupon he will tell his loyal collectors to fuck off, start selling his works exclusively to a small coterie of ultra-rich philistines, and piss it up around the Med on his yacht.

Epi now lives in Bath. He hopes that one day, long after his death, he will finally get the recognition he doesn’t deserve.

On Basquiat

For the entire span of art history, up until around the late 1800’s the ‘worth’ of a piece of art could be assessed and surmised objectively through a simple calculation of the function of the merits of technique, subject, form and composition of a piece, or the intersectionality of the qualities of classical figuration or conventional modalities of impressionism or abstraction or any of the other painterly innovations that arose out of history.

By its nature, where a host of conflicting artistic genres drawn from all the discrete disciplines of surrealism and cubism and fauvism and pointillism and art nouveau and art deco and conceptual art and pop art and graffiti and urban art and guerrilla art have inbred into the strange, deformed but still adorable bastard lovechild that is now referred to rather glibly and clumsily as ‘contemporary art’, the axiom of objective value that applied hitherto now ceases entirely to apply.

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‘Crime Pays Off’ - Epi, 2024

Acrylic & oil stick on canvas

Nowhere is this truer than in the case of Jean Michel Basquiat. Lionised by so many for his purported mastery of ‘primitivism’, scores of paint-loving pilgrims still throng to the mountain of dreck he produced- now scattered in museums and galleries around the globe like vaunted reliquaries- to genuflect at his altar of strange, formless graven idols and randomly inane scrawling. Basquiat’s work is indisputably- and should be unanimously concurred as- devoid of technique; no one but an absolute tosser could look at a Basquiat canvas and expound on his painterly ability- but I posit that it is equally devoid of absolutely everything else expected from an artwork; to wit- wit, or beauty, or insight, or social commentary, or ingenuity, or grace, or elegance, or originality, or righteous anger, or actual discernible talent.

Aside from the strange primitive figuration he indulged in, the trope of Basquiat- and that which moistens the loins of chinless art tossers the world over- was built in no small part on the mysterious and opaque jeux de mots he scrawled onto his canvases- arbitrary insertions of seemingly randomly-extracted leitmotifs drawn from canons as disparate and pointless as pre-recession 1980’s American consumer culture, colonial historiology, theology, hagiography, the Black Experience (from which this privately-educated Manhattanite could scarcely be further removed, nor allied with, given the alacrity with which he defected to the  largely all-white crowd of Studio 54-based glitterati once he had a bit of cash in his pocket), and references to arcane politico-historical events and phenomena, often drawn from classical civilisation (his mindless references to Rome would make Tacitus turn in his grave and Herodotus throw a fucking shit fit; he claimed, for example, that his 1982 work ‘Hannibal’ made reference to the second Punic Wars waged by the Carthaginians against the Roman Republic, but given that the canvas in question features merely a crudely drawn skull and a few scrawled references to the word ‘Hannibal’, his assertion that the work had any basis in historical realities is frankly risible).

But Basquiat spaffed these curious words and phrases over his work with all the jejune and flaccid erudition of a prep school swot of middling ability tossing off behind the bike sheds over a jettisoned jazz mag. Paradoxically, Basquiat- ever the anti-colonialist- strayed into intellectual territories of which he had only a dilettante’s knowledge at best, and appropriated them not to confer any deeper sense of academic value to his work but in the hope of impressing the mainly white audience he believed (incorrectly, and rather offensively to the wider black culture which he claimed to champion) would respond to such recondite subject matter. He was a settler-colonialist of cultural phenomena he seemed to know almost nothing about, invading sacred intellectual territories and defiling them by bending them to his will, throwing about whatever snippets he had clipped out of an encyclopaedia that day as a pre-speech toddler would shout out newly-acquired linguistic phonemes, tossing them around with brainless abandon, a pointless and hollow mimetic simulacrum of rote repetition of something he’d found in a book he couldn’t be bothered to finish reading; words for their own sake, given no substantive intellectual context in which to operate (set, rather, against a backdrop of almost indecipherable and utterly repellent scrawling), and employed solely as a means to hoodwink a white Manhattanite audience who purported to be cultured and educated but yet who most resolutely weren’t (the art world is the perfect refuge for waif and stray intellectual pseuds- who would otherwise be found out and shunned in any legitimate cultural milieu- to indulge in their collective orgiastic ignorance) into believing that there might be more to Basquiat’s work than his ugly, infantile, schizophrenic daubing might at first suggest.

I would posit that any resonance Basquiat’s work has with viewers is attributable not to any intrinsic substance or merit, but purely to that curious placebo effect that only contemporary art can produce in the viewer- a synthesis of feelings and emotions derived not from any raw creative power or originality or flair or beauty of cerebral substance or visceral resonance but exclusively by dint of the carefully-curated mystique of ‘art’ and ‘artist’ alone, a collectively-indulged mass delusion that has the gall to suggest that the drivel that hangs in stark white modern art museums and hushed galleries the world over isn’t, in fact, just the worthless and expensive shit that in truth it probably is.

It is there where resided Jean Michel Basquiat’s real genius! Not in his art, but in his ability to hijack the visual zeitgeist and to hoodwink an audience of credulous arrivistes (which seems to be the prerequisite of any successful contemporary artist working today) into thinking he was a legitimate creative voice, particularly of a demographic historically marginalised in not only the artistic sphere but throughout the entire span of American post-colonial history, and in his understanding of how (as already evidenced by his forebear Cy Twombly) a sprinkle of pseudo-intellectual drivel cast against a ‘matte painting’ filled with inane shit in a painterly style that implies to derive from ancient anthropological traditions that have their roots on the African subcontinent (yet is, in reality, an insult to the host of unknown and unsung African and African American artists who did, in fact, produce work of exceptional quality and technique and brilliance at the time of Basquiat’s meteoric rise) and as such is unimpeachable for fear of the critic being labelled racist- but that in reality draws more on the innate tendency of infants to scratch incoherent babble with crayons on nursery walls- can impress the perennially gullible.

And in spite of the miles of column inches limning and hymning Basquiat’s purported ability to channel his own racial identity through a style that appeared to hark back to some congenital truth of the universal experience of the African diaspora, I suggest that he painted precisely what he believed the older, wealthy, white Manhattan art crowd wanted; their tastes embraced (and continue to do so) not the stuffy formalities that were once the exclusive appurtenance of their precarious patrician rank, but a kind of conspicuous proto-progressivism, a clumsy precursor to today’s wokery that showed the superannuated sergeants of the Upper West Side old guard that as fans of Basquiat’s work they had reached some lofty plane of humanitarian cognisance, possessing such social sophistication that they too could ‘slum it’ with a louche, revolutionary artistic outrider and extol their ability to walk with kings nor lose the common touch, as Kipling put it.

Yet now more than ever its Basquiat’s appeal even more vapid and pointless. The once chattering classes- now entirely unable to chatter by dint of all the Botox- derive their sense of self worth almost exclusively from their belief that having a bit of cash in the bank has conferred upon them some superior level of sophistication and respectability that for some reason would elude the impecunious. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the art market: as so few of the slack-jawed, perma-tanned parvenus that flit around Frieze and Art Basel hoping to be noticed by Larry Gagosian could ever dream of affording an original Basquiat- or any similarly-priced artwork of that ilk- they can, for a fleeting moment, cosplay the life of truly unbridled wealth that has escaped them simply by standing next to a Basquiat canvas, taking a photo and posting it to Instagram, as if absorbing- and therefore becoming a part of- that beguiling mammonistic aura that emanates from something that costs fifty million quid.

And so today Basquiat’s œuvre derives its value solely from its propinquity to excessive personal wealth, and its association with celebrity (Jay Z and Beyoncé own a couple of Basquiats, as if that weren’t reason enough to revile his work, and Basquiat once went to bed with Madonna, an act which should by default make him a deviant and a pariah) in a culture utterly obsessed with appearing to be more successful than one actually is. ‘Art people’ who see original Basquiat works in the flesh, even when in galleries filled with sublime works by his more talented contemporaries, seem to surrender themselves to a strange and inexplicable rapture; this bizarre effect derives not from being in the presence of something great, but in the proximity of something abhorrently and unjustifiably expensive.

Basquiat’s works have become both an empty symbol of Croesian power in an epoch obsessed more than ever with the accumulation- and disposal- of wealth, and a token of the same- an asset for asset’s sake, as tediously fungible as a barrel of oil or a kilo of cobalt, his catalogue raisonné nothing more than a mindless series of stills from some facile daytime cartoon whose core demographic is six years olds playing truant and the severely mentally impaired, gushed over by a pathetic congress of dissatisfied philistines terrified of being exposed for the charlatans they are.

That being said, I did like that one he did with the dinosaur on.