Easy Fun
Tatjana Pieters - Ghent, BE
26 Mar - 7 May 2023
Tatjana Pieters is pleased to present “Easy Fun” - Michael Pybus’ 5th solo show with the gallery where the artist will debut his “Clarissa” paintings. A new mutation in his painterly exploration of pop culture and domestic spaces.
“As a teen I was obsessed with home set designs on TV, the Friends apartment, the Big brother House. I lived vicariously through them. I imagined myself in them, what my adult home would look like when I grew up. Thinking back I can see it was a form of escapism, a means for me to project myself away to a brighter, less confined future.
I enjoyed watching Nickelodeon’s "Clarissa Explains It All”. Clarissa was a cool kid, her bedroom was the centrepiece of the show. It was a kaleidoscopic mix of colours, textures, patterns & objects. She had free rein over how she decorated it. She had an alligator that lived in sand play pit. I lived in a tiny cramped house and had to share a plain bedroom with magnolia walls. I was so jealous.
One element of Clarissa's room that struck me more than anything else was a wall adorned with floral wallpaper, over which a black checkerboard pattern had been roughly hand painted. I was trapped in chintzy rural mid 90s England. Here was a symbol of it being whimsically disrupted.
That low-fi punk gesture of loutish geometric abstraction being painted over twee blossoms is a visual transgression I’ve never been able to forget. A charged marriage. An unexpected pairing. Aesthetic delinquence, the place I am most creatively engaged.
At times I’ve kept the paintings entirely abstract and in others I’ve allowed representational images to seep into frame. They are sampled from old sticker albums. Collecting stickers was probably my first active introduction to perpetual consumerism. No matter how many stickers I had I always wanted more. In that pre-internet analogue era stickers were rarified opportunities to quench my insatiable thirst for new images. Something we take for granted in our age of superfluous visuals.
For decades I've had these aesthetic echos from my formative years swirling in my mind. Now I’m translating these memories of escapism and want, through painting, into active catalysts to propel me forward as I venture forward into unexplored territory.” - Michael Pybus