Jake or Dinos Chapman are now my favourite. Last month it was Tracey’s paintings at the Hayward so I am having a bit of an YBA moment.
The private views for the brothers, who worked separately for this show, were held at both White Cube Hoxton and Mason’s yard. Black Mercs shuttled the art elite and a few celebs back and forth, I noted Jay’s date in Prada and had an envious, spring / summer 2011, banana moment.
But it was the work I coveted the most. Seriously fucked up, excellently executed and crawled right under my skin. The paintings, grant me just one please. That slightly insidious dirty palate I love, mushrooms, pigs in shit, discarded kids shoes, outlines of noses, of ears, hints of an underworld of half child / half pixie; something about them tossed me into the compost heap at the bottom of Grandpa’s garden where imaginations run wild and nature and plastic uncover themselves before virginal eyes.
Upstairs Catholic paintings and statues where flesh had been placed under duress cornered me. The paintings presented something of an illness of skin, whilst the statues were rather more vicious with flesh peeled away from the eyes and from the mouth revealing bloody emerald sparkly tissue. And with Swastikas placed on their forehead, animated cold toy eyes and forked tongues suggestive of Hindu deities, I felt we were witness to a mutation of faith, or possibly even a dissolution of it. I’m off to see Mason’s Yard today. I don’t know which brother did what and I don’t care, I LOVE IT.