Johnny, tell us about your work.
My images are often recollections of my childhood. Those impressionable things we saw as kids that somehow never quite left us. I did a lot of my growing up in front of the TV watching superheroes with extraordinary superhuman powers protecting the public against menacing villains. I grew up admiring and idolising them. My works are about just that… the way we connect with pop culture. Pop is modern life, it’s modern living. To a certain degree, we construct our identities from the vast array of images that pop culture immerses us in. Colours make us feel alive. They help define who we are and how we feel on a day-to-day basis. This is what Pop is all about.
So you’re a seasoned superhero painter?
Superheroes have become the new athletes and entertainers of our day.
We’ve rediscovered them. Everybody identifies with them. The image of ‘superhero’ reinforces the statement that salvation will come in the form of a superhero… the superhero being ourselves.
And your pop cultural references?
It’s really hard to lose my pure pop mentality whist I’m living a truly pure pop reality! I’m interested in themes and techniques drawn from popular mass culture, such as advertising, comic books and mundane cultural objects and imagery. I love banal or kitschy elements of pop culture. I’m also interested in the use and juxtaposition of words and symbols and the clever use of irony. Products, labelling, brand names, icons and logos all intrigue me immensely.
We’re interested in your technique…
My work is about pulsating colour and celebrating the trivialisation of pop culture. I love expansive use of colour, bold colours and flat colours like advertising. My work combines vibrant combinations of colour, objects and line. Words and the play on words are also prevalent in my works. Beat poets figure prominently in my consciousness. Painting for me results from a poem in my mind, which is painted out in the fast-syncopated style of beat poetry. Picasso was my earliest influence… then Matisse. Those guys were pure colour.
How do you see your paintings as personal reactions to contemporary culture? Are you documenting modern life or reacting to it?
Much of my work today deals with the rise of the mass media and the fall or decline of the individual. The ‘death of the human’ and the development of new perspectives on society, knowledge, discourse and power. Much of my work dwells on the failures of global and chaotic consumerism, media saturation and celebrity fetish. I constantly grapple with the critiques of modernity…modern life, modern living and modern thoughts. People call my work expressive pop and urban. I like to think of it as reflective realism.
And your upcoming show at NG Art Gallery?
This is the ultimate revenge exhibition… Romeo Must Die: The Super Villains Series has a back-story. Having been neglected for so long and having watched the rise of the superhero phenomena in art… the super villains take centre stage! This is the real underbelly series.
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