Bickerton surfer prov

A true artist sometimes surprises us even more with his words than with his works.

We may not have grasped the deeper meaning of his work at first glance.  In his answers to Richard Leydier of Art Press, Ashley Bickerton most often takes his interviewer by surprise. He denies, denies, denies, relativizes. And this begins with his traditionally emphasized affiliation with the Neo-Geo movement. He was even its leading artist for a long time.

But Bickerton finds, for his part, a more telling generational connection with the animal houses of Mark Dion, the frescoes of Rifkrit Tiravanijan, the curiosity cabinets of Matthew Barney, on the New York side. And the tidy monsters of the British Young Artists in London.

Lame!
And don't tell him that he makes surf art, because the motifs of boards, waves and even sharks haunt the foreground of his work. He thinks it's "lame". However, it is not because he wants to be provocative that Bickerton is so willing to use paradox. It is simply that his thinking is all about nuance. He breaks down reality in the same way that he splits up his works, reconstructing their structural form with surprising materials.

Beach boy
Surfing is thus broken down into three moments: waiting for the wave as a 'religion', 'acrobatics on a plastic toy' and 'dancing, in a tight tango with the inexhaustible energy of the waves', to which Bickerton finds 'a certain charm'. So it all depends on the angle from which one sees things, the feeling with which one experiences them.

The result is always intriguing and sometimes downright unnatural associations, couplings and sutures. But everything is thought out, premeditated. Bickerton is amused that his sudden oceanic inspiration is attributed to his move to Bali. In fact, he had dreamed it all up in New York long before. He calls it his 'spectacular variations', 'his stylistic infidelities'.

Theatre of the woman
The second degree is mostly detached from any critical or humorous intention. It's just a question of history. Of culture. In 2021, we no longer paint a Lolita from the islands as Gauguin lovingly did. We paint a Lolita à la Gauguin. Bickerton does not represent a woman but "the theatre of women". To ignore the work of an artist of Gauguin's stature is in any case to give oneself every chance of doing less well than him in the end. And above all to paint with a totally outdated look and intentions. This is not likely to happen to Ashley Bickerton. With classmates such as David Salle and Eric Fischl at CalArts in Los Angeles, he has found someone to measure himself against from the start.

Plural meanings
All of this reiterates the importance of culture in the appreciation of novelty in art. It is true that polysemy is a familiar playground for Bickerton. He has inherited from his father, a world-famous linguist, a 'rather elastic conception of language and the meanings it can generate'. The incorrigible Ashley is capable of saying, in the same sentence and about the same subject, such as the proliferation of logos on surfboards: "I was both horrified and fascinated".

A true artist is often a formidable critic. To others and, even more so, to himself. Bickerton is anything but tender with Bickerton. He probes himself like an ocean, analyses himself, questions himself. It is hard not to say that some works are more intelligent than others. They aim to understand the world better. When they are right.

Illustration : Ashley Bickerton - Orange Shark - 2008