‘The human race – how many o’em? – bores th’fck outa me.’ Not my words, but they might as well be, because Raymond Pettibon speaks so directly to the miserable modern misanthrope that it’s a little like staring into a really grubby mirror.
The American artist cut his teeth in the 1980s hardcore punk scene, designing iconic album covers for the greatest band of their genre, Black Flag. Since then he’s made a name for himself as a serious artist, with big gallery representation and price tags to match, but has lost none of his aggressive punk edge.
This show is filled with a chaotic splatter of Pettibon’s ultra-intense paintings and drawings. There are images of baseball plays, steam trains, crashing waves and rough sex, all covered in scrawled, misspelt ramblings that read like lost lines from some terrible pulp novel. Some images are stark monochrome, others are big washes of colour, but every one of them is violent, vicious and nasty. It’s a frightening room to be in, like stumbling into some psychopath’s home, if the psychopath was the best punk artist ever.
There’s a whole lot going on here. Poetry and art, cartoons and paintings, collage and illustration, all smashed together. Some works are square, others are cut in half, or overlaid and extended out of the frame. But Pettibon isn’t messing with the boundaries between these things to be some hip, avant-garde innovator; he’s doing it because he doesn’t give a shit.
This whole show is like some nasty, smudged, paranoid noir comic book that you have to walk through and live in for a while. It might not be much fun, but it won’t bore th’fck outa you.