Raymond Pettibon — À propos — Slash Paris

Raymond Pettibon (1957) enjoys playing the terrible children of contemporary imagery. Playing with symbols, playing with icons, playing with music. Capturing the full extent of globalized American iconography, each of the characters he depicts is adorned with his own heritage (now common to all Western societies) or is inscribed therein by the codes of representation, diving us into succinct narratives with multiple reading levels. His positions embrace the worst populism in all its unbearable nihilism.

From alternative micro-culture to the great precepts of religion, from Pop culture to philosophy via the history of art, his images, very often accompanied by hard-hitting texts with amusing esotericism and enjoying their absolute freedom paint an unbridled mirror of our consumer societies. Faced with the flood of images, the cacophony of speeches, Pettibon develops his personal corpus, elusive and irreducible to any ideology. Anarchist, libertarian, borrowed or insolently Jean-Foutiste, his art of quotation swirls advertising slogans, classic quotations, hippies, stars, messiahs or has-beens in the center of its vortex, letting emerge, in the he eye of its cyclone, the reflection of major figures with a sharp eye on art (John Ruskin, Marcel Proust, Walt Whitman) struggling with acerbic observers of society (Daumier, Hogarth…).

Like his character Gumby, a deformed green and minimalist humanoid navigating with absolute freedom in the iconography of the present, Pettibon plays and has fun with all the messages, all the thoughts and all the content of meaning that he surround them insofar as by diverting them, it causes a swing in the thought of the one who follows them as well as the one who flees them. As a collector of the vagaries of our time, his museum of the horrors of the present slips nowadays in a denunciation and fascination of its own self-accepted truth that may impose distance and demands distrust of his ideas.

This infernal toxicity then makes all of a hasty art that embraces its time so well that it bears its contradictions with all its tragic necessity.

Guillaume Benoit for Slash-Paris