Cept v. Mike Ballard - One Artist's Group Show

30 Hertford Road
Dalston, London

22 Nov - 30 Nov 2008

Photos: NoLionsInEngland except where stated

A natural separation in graffiti culture requires art fags admiring street art to take their asymmetric haircuts and pink glassless glasses to Shoreditch, while the hard core graff guys get their secret society writer-shall-write-only-for-writer thing up in the provinces, like Hackney, Hounslow and Dalston. One person who metaphorically lives within both worlds is Cept. Actually Cept exists across far more than two worlds. There’s the Cept who has been ruling the streets for over 20 years tagging and writing and generally getting up with TRP crew.



Then there’s the Cept who takes spray can art to the streets



There’s also the Cept who transfers his street persona to canvasses and gallery walls, more of that soon. Finally there’s Mike Ballard, the St Martins graduate artist who inhabits Cept’s body and surfaces from time to time to produce dark and jumbled paintings. Or is it the other way round?


photo: HowAboutNo

To find all these Cepts means orienteering to a labyrinthine and rickety lockup workshop in a dimly lit and nondescript warren of utilitarian housing estate streets behind Kingsland Road. Bang loudly on the corrugated shutter with a number 30 on it!

The ground floor space looks like an artist’s store room, heavy oil paintings are mounted high on coarse brick walls, an illuminated cocktail light box is pushed into a corner, in small dead-end cubicles small screens show looping scratchy multimedia film clips while all around are many relics and wall daubings of former occupants. The roughness of the room mirrors the artist’s determined avoidance of pretentious frippery, a white cube this ain’t.


photo: HowAboutNo

Since impressionism, artists have been preoccupied with battling against the perceived notion of an accepted art, the grand art of landscapes and religon which is displayed to show good taste, worthy subjects and high technique. Cept sees the acceptance of graffiti and its entry into galleries alongside “traditional” art as a battle won, see the diagonal flow of the all conquering graffiti writers coming off the streets in the top right overwhelming the cherubs and fine art of the establishment towards the bottom left.


Throwing The House Out Of The Window

A particular theme is an illustratorly concentration on karma sutra imagery, present in a tryptich of digital prints as well as a series of paste-ups papering the stairway to the upper floor where Cept’s pop art comic aesthetic is displayed. Such images might be found in HowAboutNo's flickr. The perve.

Borrowing images from comics and most obviously from pop art’s high priest Lichtenstein, Cept tells a romantic tale involving the anti hero, a super villain, lets call him Cept for convenience and a pure pop 1950’s ideal of feminine beauty, a girl who admires Cept the super villain both as a concept and as physical specimen. Her love is possibly tragic and un-requited, she cossets a Cept graffiti tag to her cheeks as nowadays the love for graffiti has come in from the cold.


Remember When Graffiti Was Hated (photo: HowAboutNo

Her intrigue with graffiti doesn’t subjugate her need for a man who possesses old fashioned qualities of infallibility, dependability and heroism. She dotes on the super villain but recognises and indeed admires the flaws in his character, awakening within her a fascination for his desire for possession of public space.


How….Why? (photo: HowAboutNo)

Meanwhile Cept the Super Villain is seemingly going through a crisis, split by his comic hero superpowers and the conflicting demands of the old fashioned modern romantic. So he still leaps unscathed from unexplained explosions,


If It Kills Me (photo: HowAboutNo)

he coldly wields control over others’ destinies at the press of a button,


Mr Freeze (photo: HowAboutNo)

and un-swervingly faithful to his inner criminal, he gets his mark up on society’s walls


Letterman

Privately however, angst nags at him, he senses the futility in endlessly repeating his super villain antics and where we find the super villain away from the women and the heroic deeds, we find canvasses depicting pain, despair and an inner tension.


Tough Love (photo: HowAboutNo)


He Who Was Nothing – Is Nothing Once More (photo: HowAboutNo)

Cept showcases many more themes and styles apart from the comic hero imagery. He blends his skillz with the letter into his pop art imagery to greatest effect in this sharp almost art nouveau styled goddess, tresses of hair cascade down forming twisting into Cept’s letters.


Stripes

Cept frequently likes to play with concealed images, where possibly random illustrations only reveal the true subject through some chance and close scrutiny.


photo: HowAboutNo

Descending down a second set of great fire of London era wooden stairs, which look like they ought to lead to a den of gin-sozzled, brawling women and opium wrecks, we stoop under a barrier blocking the top half of a doorway and emerge into the highlight of the show. A truly astonishing stark and punchy two-tone walls, floor and ceiling painted room of visual illusion and eyeball defeating trickery..


Cept Room (photo: HowAboutNo)

Your eyes are overwhelmed by the intensity of the contrasting lines, swirls, shapes and objects. Cept creates perspective, plays with it again for fun and creates an illusion of corridors, holes, seascapes blending into room interiors and a selection of characteristic Cept comic book imagery. The floor has wave ripples lapping up to strongly patterned venetian tiled floor, whilst in other parts a series of painted steps disappear down into a painted manhole sinking into the earth’s core.



Two roof columns create fountains of paint erupting from the floor, surging outwards across the ceiling before breaking against the walls. The doting beauty gazes fondly at Cept’s tag, yet nearby the super villain lies out of sight, drained, jaded and semi-comatose in the shallow waters lapping up over his name.



A series of painted steps across the floor leads to a trompe l’oeil image of a cufflinked hand at the end of a corridor clutching the letter C.



Using a deconstructed graff writing form in which the structure of the letters has been totally discarded to leave a residue of wild style elements, the painted structure breaks up into almost abstract swirls, dots and moiré fringes only to reform into regular geometric patterns.


photo: HowAboutNo

It is un-avoidable that cynics will compare this room with D*Face’s dis-orientation room at the BRP Apopcalypse Now show last month but whilst that created a Keith Haring tribute using D*Dog wings and eyes, this Cept installation uses non repeating Cept imagery with not a single line or curve repeated anywhere. All of this was created single-handedly by Cept – no interned paint chuckers here – and took three weeks having been conceived before the D*Face show, though Cept confesses to a sinking heart upon entering the D*Face show and realising the extent of convergence with his work.


photo: HowAboutNo

A curiosity worth mentioning is that from a previous use, apparently the walls of the installation room have a Mode 2 mural directly on the brick, Cept has clad the wall with boards to leave the Mode 2 beneath intact. Respect.

It is worth whizzing up to Dalston just to be overwhelmed by one of the most intense visual experiences this year and one of the most satisfyingly staged shows (we do like our spaces rank and grubby). Bang loudly on that shutter door, but do it fast as the space is only open to the public until Sunday 30th, excluding Wednesday and Friday. Bugger it, check with Stella Dor before travelling!

Taking pictures in such challenging light without safety harness and hard hat contravenes all photographic health and safety regs, so hats off to HowAboutNo – check his pics here

The Krah - Got His Shizzle On Lock Down. . .

The Krah continuing to confuse both art theives and council buff squads, and managing to remain the longest lived pieces on the streets at the moment. Only a matter of time before others follow his lead surely?

K-Guy - Under The Mattress Banking

Northern Rock had a run, house prices fell off the cliff, Lehman Brothers went to the wall and we all suddenly became bank owners as the government miraculously suddenly found billions and billions of quid to bale out the banks. This pisses K-Guy off, and he likes a rant and a rave and taunts hypocrisy, greed and stupidty. A month ago to the day, he set up his shrine “In Loving Memory Of The Great Boom Economy”.




That piece deservedly got global attention but even as he executed that installation he was already developing his next idea and last night, four locations around the City Of London (well, perhaps one or two were just over the edge) acquired new branches of the age old tried and test Sleep Easy Family Bank.




It did for K-Guy's granny in her time so why shouldn’t it do today? Think of the benefits – it’s highly personal, as Sonia and Mike may testify. In fact, you can make out the fistfuls of cash sticking out of their mattress (K-Guy loves the details).




You can withdraw however much you want, whenever you want, say happy bankers Mike and Trish of City Road – their branch cheekily placed right outside Barclays Bank.




Pause for moment for a little story about the practicalities. Do you have half a dozen mattresses going spare? How do you transport them? Apparently K-Guy was spotted driving up from his reinforced economic bunker with three double mattresses tied to the roof of his car and two single mattresses in the boot. Vigilant PC Plod, in unmarked wheels, pulls him over and enquires “pray tell what is afoot, you looked like a slice of bread surfing a pea as you approached”. Thankfully the explanation that the ensemble is on it's way to Shoreditch to be part of an art installation is entirely satisfactory, indeed almost completely predictable for that area. It’s amazing sometimes how you can get away with it simply by telling the truth.

Another advantage of sticking your wad under the mattress, the interest rate is low according to the Bank of Stef, who obviously owns a bank and keeps other people’s money under his mattress.




Even a small one will hold quite a lot of money beamed little Lewis, age 5, outside Royal Exchange.




Four out of five of the K-Guy pieces had disappeared before lunchtime today making the word ephemera really too elongated for describing the lifecycle of this work. Children – taking rubbish off the streets, stencilling on it and puting it back out on the streets is still going to look like rubbish to 99.9% of the world’s jobsworths with a pick-up.




The current edition of a street art/graphic design mag contains the ludicrous claim that Hush is the only serious contender for the heavyweight belt currently worn by Banksy. Well as long as ideas, wit, placement, attention to detail and satire have anything to do with it, K-Guy is likely if he keeps this up to soon be twirling that belt over his head before throwing it in the bin.




More pictures here

Little Art Book Group Show

Alphabet Bar
Beak St, London
11 Nov – 24 Dec 08


In a world straddled by the behemoths such as PoW, Souled Out Studios and BRP, comparatively un-sung boutique urban art print operations like Little Art Book come as a more personable and significantly less frantic tonic. For a start, consider the free-at-the-door limited edition show print; if BRP did that you’d have to close Shoreditch High Street and hire Madonna’s bouncers for the queue.


LAB Group Show – Event Print


Shout to The Krah who whether the wall is indoors or outside unfailingly pulls off an inventive, detailed and flowing piece of fantasy art. The main wall piece flows across a canvas, a practise which always strikes me as curious because if you buy the canvas you leave behind on the gallery wall a chunk of the composition many times the size of your painting. Anyway, the painting contains oodles of Krah signature surrealism, acid references, manic faces growing out of twisting organic limbs and a fluid looking being with hair on fire.


The Krah – The Arsonist


The canvas is entitled The Arsonist but check out the detail, psychotic grins and bulging eyes suggest much more powerful pyromaniac demons. The background has a very graphic tapered design which deliberately emphasises the counter flow to the slanting drift of the burning figure’s body.


The Krah – The Arsonist (detail)


Main attraction for buyers was the release of two prints, Minnie and Mickey by Rugman. The prints themselves are not un-pleasant, undeniably technically well done and the hand finished comic book collage provides satisfaction for uniqueness fetishists but, even allowing for a seasonal Halloween uptick, there is no way around the thought that it’s another damn cliché, in fact two clichés, done to death. See what I did there…skull…done to death…oh please yourselves.

Rugman - Minnie


Before looking at a couple other hot prints, an apology for the quality of the photos. They are even more shite than usual as using flash in the Soho drinking den gloom was un-avoidable and meant taking pics stage right.

A new name to this blog and artist responsible for stand-out print is Gabriel Moreno whose “Hard Woman”, a hand pulled two colour screen print rocks. Possibly literally, the prominent female looks a bit like Karen O (Yeah Yeah Yeahs) whose wacky and endearing fashion kookiness hadn’t hitherto brought GBH to mind. (to prove how that Id could be a million miles off target – what’s Jimi doing there?)


Gabriel Moreno – Hard Woman


Semi naked skinheads with bondage will undoubtedly grab the Old Compton Street crowd but Vilchez covers all bases by partnering the homo-erotic images with a tattoo’d babe in a bikini.



Vilchez – Tree Of Dreams (photo shamelessly stolen from LittleArtBook)


Special mention to Rourke Van Dal whose Not On Your Nelly print got a warm reception upon release and looks stunningly punk in the flesh, mild surprise to find that it is still available is appropriate. Perhaps it’s the un-forgivable pun in the name that put people off?


Rourke van Dal – Not On Your Nelly


Piss poor pics of most of the other prints from the show here

Attention Spam - Hong Kong Happenings

ATTENTION SPAM - 14 November - 10 December

Cyclops, D*Face, David Bray, Vesna Parchet & Word to Mother

Schonei Main Gallery
21-31 Old Bailey Street
Central Hong Kong
MON - SAT 10.30am - 6.30pm
http://www.adaptagallery.com/

A special blog post and props going out to our friend and fellow blogger Selph ESP http://espvisuals.blogspot.com/ for what looks like it will be an absoloutely amazing project.

D*Face

UK Adapta have just set up their satellite gallery project known as Adapta Gallery and the first show called "Attention Spam" will be in Hong Kong next week, Thursday NOV 13th. They have imported 5 British artists: D*Face, Cyclops, David Bray, Word To Mother & Vesna Parchet to HKG to go bombing the streets, as well as maybe attending the preview perhaps for a refreshing cold beer afterwards.

Cyclops

David Bray

Vesna Parchet

Selph has expressed his extreme joy at getting to go out and hit streets with some of his idols and contemporaries, we should receive exclusive film footage of their happenings upon his return to the UK all being well.

Faile - Lost In Glimmering Shadows

Lilian Baylis Old School,
London SE11 6PY
7th – 16th Nov 2008

Photos: nolionsinengland and Wallkandy (where stated)

What we love, want and require of street art is that the artist applied some skill and sweat putting up work illegally on street walls. Faile qualifies, though perhaps there is a bit too much of the legacy is due to both paste ups (prepared in off street) and with permission (Tate Modern Street Art). Thankfully even far from their Brooklyn turf there still is enough evidence in London for Faile of spray paint stencilled on the wall.


Happens Everyday – Streets of London



Faile Girl


The Faile duo also made a big impact at the Cans Festival in the Summer.




....and have been papering the streets with Glimmering Shadows images around Shoreditch and Smithfield in the build up to this new show.




The location for this Lazarides originated show was a prefab mid last century school a million miles from the closest tube station. Past the greeters and bouncers (“You’ve come all this way? In you go”) the setting consisted of two spaces. A lobby area downstairs houses a collection of palettes (circular wooden discs, various sizes between about 2 and 4 feet in diameter), a marble (effect?) Faile Bunny Boy sculpture and a pyramid of Glimmering Shadows Faile boxes. Up the stairs a large hall with raised outer mezzanine level and sunken central floor, think of a large theatre-in-the-round room provides a cathedral-like setting for a collection of 18 epic Faile canvasses and an installation of 14 prayer wheels.


photo: Wallkandy


The lobby puts the viewer on immediate notice that the deft touch with the tense and dramatic pop art comic image hasn’t deserted Faile. Both the palletes and the boxes use details from the Faile images shown on the canvasses upstairs. Maybe it’s a trick of the lighting (and there’s no doubt Laz does good staging!) but the boxes look even more lush that their oversize canvas counterparts.


Bunny Boy and Palettes - photo: Wallkandy



Glimmering Shadows Boxes


The canvasses upstairs are huge, generally you are going to struggle to hang one over the fireplace. One particular canvass, The Great Leap however is huge plus added steroids, perhaps it might cover a pair of tennis court service boxes or cover your full size snooker table with plenty to spare


The Great Leap of Faile


The canvasses are done in a combination of acrylic, stencilled paint on collaged paper with the occasional addition of dirty wash effects (sealing?) and thin swishes of spray paint. They rock the classic Faile torn stripes effect though close inspection suggests that rather than multiple layers shredded to reveal graphic images in the substrata, the technique may involve a single layer of torn stencilled images placed mosaic style onto the canvas.


In Search Of Sacred Visions



Betrayal Story - detail


Update: artist Irony (see here but not the Ben Frost canvasses) has corrected this on a forum, his advice is:
"Although they might look like collaged paper on canvas - they are NOT.The collage effect is attained through a series of silk-screened layers on a single piece of canvas. This is then retouched - painted - by hand. ".

Another input from www.Wallkandy.net forum member onemandown72 is:

"Whilst there we were told that Faile made a small original with all the ripping / tearing etc, then projected said image onto the large canvas, and used this image to then paint a giant replica of the small original, so not screenprinting or collaging, but single layer of acrylic".

Wallkandy himself quotes the fecal face blog as saying:
"For years I thought that the FAILE rip was some sort of paste job. But after close examination touching and poking while nobody was looking I discovered that each layer is painted and then painted over again with strategic masking creating a simulated rip. This is canvas and layers of paint, labor intensive...That's what I am talking about!"

I had looked at other sources, including the Bonhams catalogue where the Faile canvasses are described as "acrylic and stencil spray paint on canvas". My point is the artifice is to look like torn strips but that is not what it is. We now need a smartarse to come along and advise either these are all the same thing or they all adequately described how Faile does work or has worked.
The Glimmering Shadows collection introduces new images which adhere to the tried and tested Faile themes – noble and heroic Indian chiefs, vulnerable scantily clad sylph like squaws, predatory animals and old Faile friends like the Challenger rocket and the rabid wolf. Tension within comic strip imagery is created though a threatening circumstance, a dramatic abbreviated sentence.


Warriors Forgotten


Three canvasses are devoid of the comic strip imagery, in one case commenting on the American psyche with a graphic corruption of the American flag and another couple favouring collages text forms to probe at the dichotomy between the cliches of the American freedom and the prohibitions and controls to preserve those freedoms


Land Of The Free


The prayer wheels are made up from a great collection of fragments of pop graphics, hooker calling card style Faile slogans and classic Faile heritage images, they are stunning to look at and collectively made a great installation, individually they are unusual but awkward novelty sculptures. What photos can’t convey is the texture and mechanics of the prayer wheels. The images are cut like wood blocks that could be used for printing, and the idea of a prayer wheel is that they turn in a spindle, in Tibet monks turn them while humming a mantra and the wheels act like a reservoir of prayer, growing more potent the more they are turned and errrrr..mantra’d over





Prayer Wheel - detail


It is unlikely that Faile could ever make a dull image, they can however make original art on a scale and to a budget which is going to place it way beyond the means of most street art fans, but then isn’t most decent original work. To see such a coherent collection of work on this scale is a rare treat, it is immediately comparable to the hanging of the Seagrams Rothko’s in the Tate at the moment and probably even more epic in presentation. Definitely worth making the trip there, so long as you haven’t given your personal security guard the day off.


99c Paradise


Wallkandy certainly knows which part of a camera to point at a painting and you can view his pics here, Nolionsinengland isn’t fit to tie Wallkandy’s shoelaces together but his pics are here.

Faile Today, Gone Tomorrow

Buffed/Stolen by this time tomorrow....now which bookmakers will take that bet on? ?