Two Peacocks. A Department Store

“Two Peacocks comes as a protest against categorizing art and artists.”

Curated by John Walter, Space Station Zsa Zsa (installation shot), 2011. Dimensions variable. Photo Credit: Ollie Harrop.

Courtesy of Pump House Gallery, Battersea.

Two Peacocks. A Department Store
Jeanne Pansard-Besson

The scene immediately absorbs you. An explosion of colors spreads in space like a peacock’s fan. There are all kinds of greens, pinks, yellows, blues… No traces of white here, but for the two golf balls on John Walter’s Crazy Golf installation at the back of the room: this it all that remains from the White Cube.

Walter, artist, producer of the show—not curator, he specifies—welcomes you in a silvery-black suit with a shiny, blue bowtie and a black, sequined wig. With a big smile, he offers you wine and cake and conducts a small chat with you, as a good host should.

The whole space shouts “Welcome!” and invites you to explore the world of Walter and his team: Cian Donnelly, Corinne Felgate, Michael Whitby, Will McLean, Neesha Champaneria & Hanna Gillespie, Matt Breen, Diana Taylor, Ludovica Gioscia, Jamie Quantrill, and Ollie Harrop. They have brought their practices together to build a fantasy store, complete with an art department, clothing, hair & beauty, lighting, audio visual, bookshop, florist, and bar. The garments are free—if you’re willing to ride down a pink slide inscribed “We’ve been waiting for you” and “Slide on me sexy” into a pool of clothes inside a child’s play house (Felgate, Champaneria & Gillespie). You walk on colored rugs and around sculpted flowers and vases on mirrored pillars (Walter, Quantrill, Whitby). At “Bibliotheque Mclean,” you can leaf through Walter’s painted giant tome, laid out open on the floor, as well as his two volumes of painted notebooks displaying a parade of eclectic motives echoing his paintings, lilies, gallbladders, and miniatures. His work is filled with references to English pop culture (for instance the face of Pat Butcher from Eastenders or comedian Johnny Vegas in his bathtub) and phrases such as “Note to self: relationships make me fat.” The backdrop for his paintings are wallpapers, made from photographs of walls taken by Ollie Harrop in Ghana. We go traveling with Butcher and Vegas.

On a back wall is a collection of small ink drawings by Cian Donnelly. Sized as though taken from different notebooks, they depict scenes with recurrent characters. Beautifully drawn lines and colors take the viewer to a childlike dream world. But upon closer approach, these naïve-looking pictures prove to belong to the universe of a decidedly grown-up child. In one, five rather asexual figures are piled on top of each other, as though in a children’s game, in actuality they are fucking each other in an “Endless Fuckknuckle,” according to the legend. Another tiny drawing shows a window and a green arm reaching for it, with the enigmatic title “Everything was ready, even the window frame.” Each of Donnelly’s drawings is at the same time funny as a comic strip and beautiful as a drawing can be, with humor and poetic artistry constantly nourishing each other.

“Two Peacocks” is a breath of fresh air. Not only does the exhibition thumb its nose to the contemporary art world and its fussy cocktail openings, but it also proposes new ways of displaying and looking at art. There are no labels. Each work grows into the next–so we see the colors of Walter’s books reflected in Donnelly’s drawings. The obsession over signature drifts away in a space that brings individuals together, both artists and viewers, making them experience art, taking them out of themselves, out of their boundaries. “Two Peacocks” comes as a protest against categorizing art and artists: in this space each artist is allowed to play with every genre and every artist. The message: we have had enough with the rule that art has to be heavy and sombre to be good. “Two Peacocks” dares to go for the rainbow, to embrace the insanity and beauty of colors. It portrays the artist–and us–as a clown. It makes us laugh and think about the practice and display of art, but also, about our own dreams and place in the world. Is this not what art is for?

“Two Peacocks. A Department Store” is on view in Newcastle upon Tyne.

This article was published by NY Arts Magazine, 2011. NY Arts Magazine is published by Abraham Lubelski. Sponsored by Broadway Gallery, NYC and World Art Media.