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BUTTERFLIES, SHADOWS AND KRYPTON

It’s hard to focus on the laptop screen this month to write. I’ve got a pair of the most gorgeous blue eyes by my side. Little Ari is nearly a week old now, and fatherhood still feels abstract. Everyone thinks his or her baby is the most beautiful in the world but I’m convinced mine really is. I’m engrossed by his every movement, twitch and smile. When his eyes open the whole world lights up. This idyllic domestic sanctuary is a far cry from last Sunday night.

There’s a wailing scream coming from the bathroom. 15 minutes ago we were watching The Yeah Yeah Yeah’s on T.V running through ‘Zero’ whilst we munched through Sarah’s delicious homemade salmon fish cakes. Why didn’t I grab that little overnight bag by the door? I don’t seem to have the confidence to follow my intuition these days. The
screaming got worse and before I knew it we were in the back of an ambulance. Sally and Sarah, our over generous
hosts sped towards my house on a mission to uncover a growing list of essential items. “This can’t be the baby… it’s
surely just the early signs. They’ll take a look at her and send us back home for a week or two…”

My head was still spinning from the events a couple of nights before, seated in a big dome tent in Kensington Gardens watching Peter Pan. The meticulous design of the production was gloriously engrossing, taking the audience from London through the air to Neverland, thanks to a state of the art 360 degree projection complete with revolutionary 3d animation. Whilst the subtlety of J. M. Barrie’s original play may not have been translated fully, I did find myself posing the question of eternal youthfulness. Is it really so good never to grow up? If Pan is the child in all of us, there’s a sense of isolation in him like our own inner child stranded in an adults universe. He’s left in a very empty Neverland on his own, only resurfacing through desperation to find Wendy a grown woman, a real mother, such that she could only become in the real world. Peter can’t cope, he stops and snorts in a special way that causes grownups to die. Without his shadow he doesn’t cause a visible mark on the real world. With the little one on the way, I suppose my childhood will officially end too.

It was a hot night in Kensington Gardens, the glow of the tent behind us and the silhouettes of the trees against an
almost purple sky. The crowd snaked towards the park exit. My phone beeped, I reached down and there was the
text. Michael Jackson had passed away, a supposed heart attack. I boarded the bus avoiding the Jackson material on my iPod and dashed home. Once back I flicked my TV set on to see my friend Uri Geller explaining what he thought had happened. It’s true. The King of Pop was gone.

It seems so odd that a man who was obsessed with Pan passed whilst I was watching the play. The allegory between
Michael and Peter became all too glaring. I must confess I was the biggest Jackson fan as a kid, dreaming of adult
life and crying to his childhood tunes. He spoke in a language that was mine. I believe he was hugely isunderstood,
I wish he had of been here to see how much the world really did care about his work, and I sincerely hope that we
learn our lesson that no matter how strange people are, they are people. If Michael had looked and acted like Joe
Bloggs we may never have been left his legacy. The ‘Billie Jean’ beat and baseline alone is worth it. Whilst a whole
generation of kids grew up idolizing him, dreaming that one day they may be like their king, he stayed young forever in Neverland but those kids are approaching 30 and having their own children. I fear that it wasn’t until MJ’s death that he finally had his shadow sewn back on, and not until then was his true impact finally felt on the real world.

It was even stranger because I had spent the last week in my brand new studio beavering away at a diptych for a
collector in Greece, whilst listening to Bad and Thriller on repeat. What my new neighbours must of thought I don’t
know! Still with Raqib Shaw underneath me I think anything goes. His studio is a cavernous mass of stuffed birds and flowers blooming from every corner. An opulent overdose of floral fantasy such that you might see in his works. Sort of like an Elton John summer Fete on steroids. Looking at his show at the White Cube his environment made more sense, with his densely populated chaotic stories of isolated kings trying to catch butterflies, whilst gods battle the other world in his psychedelic, rhinestone fantasies. I like his pictures; they have a humour about them. They are unapologetically Eastern in feel and up-close they have an honest rawness in ‘filling in’. One gets the impression that his studio assistants really enjoy making them. Overall they shine like compelling and Kitschy jewels.

Once at the hospital, for me at least the report is good. This is the real thing; we’ll not be going tonight. I know
it’ll be a long one but I also know that we’ll be leaving with a life in our arms. It’s hot in the little birthing room and
I feel like taking a plunge in the pool to cool off, but I’m not sure dads are allowed. Outside the summer night is
in full swing.

And for this London heatwave, I blame the Art Car Boot Fair, take my advice if you ever want to guarantee the
weather for a wedding, schedule it to coinside. The heat is always ridiculous. It’s as guaranteed as some rain at Glastonbury. I love the occasion, all the artists and art people coming out to play for the day in a car park in East London. This year I spread some posters reading ‘FREE LOVE’ over the area for people to grab and teamed up with my good friend Sarah Maple, we’d stayed up late the night before and painted a load of t-shirts with witty slogans like “my other t-shirt’s an Emin” and “I came to the art car boot fair and all I got was this lousy t-shirt”. Gavin Turk, sold some boot prints at the boot fair, literally dipping his boot in paint and making work. Sir Peter Blake’s prints sold out in record time with a 200 plus deep queue at one stage. Luckily Sarah and I managed to talk him into signing some goodies, her Petshop Boys CD and my glass coke bottle.

Whilst I agree with my dear friend David Hancock that there was an overwhelming dose of Tomma Abts in the air this student show season, the Royal Academy graduates show was a force all of it’s own. It’s interesting the cross pollination between students having spent 3 years next to each other in London’s art school answer to
Hogwarts. There was for me one artist who stood out head and shoulders above the rest, well a severed body and a head above the rest. Nicky Carvel’s work has been on my radar for a few years, I instantly fell in love with her post-pop lurid colour palette and her irreverent almost aggressive take on painterly sculpture when I saw them in the lobby of a bank at Canary Wharf. Since then her work has evolved into a complex reworking of her
personal obsessions, a furtive and often nostalgic glance towards her childhood heroes. In this series her obsession with Brian Harvey from British boy-band sensation E17 takes on an almost religious experience. Whilst the graduated fade was a thread that ran through most of the student’s paintings for some weird reason, Nicky owned it. Her crystal camber was more like something from Krypton than Top Of The Pops. It’s in this transcendental, parallel ritual space that we can start to dissect the stature that contemporary culture rewards it’s stars. My feet stand in place of a young girl looking up at her idol, at his myth, his solemn rejection of her. That passive barrier that appears bright and alluring in Carvel’s work is exactly its power. There’s a line of truth that can’t be crossed, where our idol becomes human.

Jackson, one of my idols never became human to his public, he never let us inside, in one way he was the worlds greatest magician taking so many of his secrets with him past the end.

Nearly 8 hours had passed and I had my arms in the birthing pool. I witnessed the most beautiful thing I have ever
seen. A shadowy out of proportion head emerging under the water, I could see my son’s eyes and his ears, followed
by a shoulder and a little hand. Startled by the world he flinched and covered his face. Nature did everything the
way she was supposed to. I cut the cord and kissed his head, and whilst it was a long night I’m still beaming.

If 8 hours in a birthing suite seemed like a lifetime just imagine Justin Mortimer spending the last four years in his studio engulfed by the dystopian zeitgeist that seems to have melancholically marched to London from Eastern Europe. I couldn’t face his show at five hundred dollars in Vyner Street without thinking of Adrian Ghenie’s works on show at Haunch of Venison. Ghenie’s pieces are compelling and extraordinarily good paintings, they draw you
in with their tricksy tension, but their downbeat narrative for some reason isn’t convincing, it’s not been lived, there’s something not felt on the surface. There may be a David Lynch tone in the air but Adrian is missing, at best he’s a tourist. However in Mortimer’s work these feel a lot less like the artist is lost and much more like the environment itself has abandoned him. There’s an uncomfortable separation between the visceral surface and the grasping desperate figures that he conjures. There’s a genuine pain in their motion, one that I truly believe the artist to have felt. The second I saw them they spoke volumes to me, they are by far some of the best paintings I have seen for many years.

Oh, I’d better finish up. Little Ari’s smiling eyes have turned to a frown; I think it’s nappy change time. Trust me I
need the practise.