“Matisse is an important influence for me. He condenses form so much; his paintings have a feeling of joy and ease about them that I try to capture in my own work. This sense of leisure is coupled with a perverse or sinister feeling that comes from simplifying standard life imagery to these elided forms. In Melonebidone... there’s an image of a strange building with a big leaf washed up on the beach and there are two actual Froot Loops stuck to the painting’s surface which look like shells or pebbles. I started with the yellow and green beach ball which was inspired by a melon in a late Matisse painting. ‘Melone’ is Italian for melon, and ‘bidone’ means ‘trashcan’ but is also slang for a footballer who was bought for a big transfer fee but flopped. I like this idea of promise and failure in relation to my work: it has both an excitement and flatness to it.”
“I think of my paintings as akin to opening a can of soda: there’s a gasp of the effervescent but you know it’s going to go flat. I use flat things and they go flat in the painting, but my job is to add nutrition or levity – that’s why the handling is quite breezy and colourful. A lot of my imagery is affected by graphic connections, they’re quite two dimensional with large coloured in areas. For Superbidone Pizza Delivery I was looking at Matisse’s Le Bonheur De Vivre. The bouncy-looking trees come from dog food packaging and they reminded me of Matisse’s foliage. The brown cloud was developed from imagery of milk splashes. Everything has rhythmic shapes, and there’s a feeling of academic landscape. I was thinking that making a painting is like trying to deliver a motif, so there’s a pizza dropped in at the bottom...delivered. There’s also a small one half behind a green tree in the middle. The red dots at the top right are tomatoes.”
“Sunday Forno... is my newest painting in this group. ‘Forno’ is Italian for oven: it’s a place where you insert raw material, fire it, and cook it, and I was thinking about this in relation to the way I make my paintings. There’s a repeated image of a sculptural head that appears to be smashed or fragmented, and images of bowls. These are consumed by red Cy Twombly-like scribble which I think of as fire. The flame forms come from the idea of the oven. I like how it relates to surrealist and metaphysical paintings where fire is used symbolically. In this painting, the blue and black scribbled lines have a function: they’re like painting tropes or tendencies, and I use them to bridge classic painting with everyday graphics. These lines hit a lyrical or expressive note in Sunday Forno... it looks like smoke, but also steam coming off the motifs. That’s the main inspiration for this work: a motif ready to put in the oven, to use or distribute, to give off steam.”
“My compositions are prepared beforehand, and I often work from collages or quick doodles. Like Carra Sings is a small work on paper. It’s a collage and there are crushed Froot Loops glued onto it that look like sand. Froot Loops are this really bland empty oat filler that have vitamins added to them, and I think of them as an analogy for painting: adding a moment of vivid nutrition to a homogenous base. Sometimes the images are relatively bland and I agitate them to give them more life or levity.”
“For my work I scavenge images from everyday graphic sources; I have a big collection of pizza and cereal boxes. The boxes sit around the studio and I like the idea of importing their imagery to my canvases and re-exporting them in painting space. The bird figure in Nutrition Highlights is taken from Toucan Sam, the mascot for Froot Loops. I alter the images to make them my own by stretching, reconfiguring, and reinvesting in them. All my work has a strong relationship to metaphysical painting. I’m interested in artists such as De Chirico. De Chirico title phrases like ’The Mystery and Melancholy of...’ are highly suggestive; I search for metaphysical tones in my source material - an alternate title for this painting might have been ’The Enigma Of A Toucan’. My work uses things which are everyday, but also have a sort of joie-de-vivre. I tend to work in a state where rarefied art and commercial vernacular are confused. I like the idea of pitching something into the painting to give it a new life or buoyancy.”