Starting upstairs: we see PM's most repeated trope, the portrait of the grotesque and/or (soon to be) desolate girl/woman. The theme of femininity mistreated runs strongly through all but his earliest work, and of those early paintings many take heavy influence from Toulouse-Lautrec's scenes of the Folie Bergere, of working women, of the florid tease. These women are shadowed with strong black calligraphic lines that accentuate the feminine curves much as if conflating the black hair on a Gauguin Tahitian with a Picasso vagina sketch. The others are the grotesques with buckled faces and backgrounds so dark and dank the dampness oozes out. They look out upon the viewer, ashamed to have been captured, happy when the viewer doesn't stare. They are truly challenging, shy, difficult to engage with, poisoned in their genes.
In the front room downstairs are a series of smaller female heads, portraits that, in the light impasto working of the paint and the expressionist rendering of the sitter, feel like much diluted Frank Auerbach . The larger full-body protraits are more unsettling for the physical context in which the subjects are presented: falling somewhere short of Balthus' moral questions, though using the same words. The still life flowers are rendered as if Auerbach was taking on the Scottish Colourists, and both were losing.
The back room downstairs has a group of four pictures that return to the evocative use of thick, quasi-calligraphic lines as seen in his early works. Here they are not used as highlight, but alone. Full of movement they have unwound themselves only to become tangled again in a colourful morass of rear-entry penetration. The same sexual position is repeated in each of the four pictures, at the same scale, as if celebrating the re-enactment of a fantasy without any regard for the narrative requirements of good pornography: four orgasms. In their capture of movement, animal physicality and transgression, and for the bravado of the brushwork, these are passable bathroom art.
The most recent paintings, hanging in the lobby, are the sub-Francis Bacon bull-fuck series. Here we are faced with the allegory of man as animal, bovine, horned and, again, a butt-fucker. PM's palette in most previous works, comprised of dark browns, greens and highlights in pink, has shifted radically to include pure black and vivid hues from across the spectrum. The use of a spherical cubism is also evident and in style, scale, colour and content this most recent series is a sincere, if utterly sycophantic homage to Bacon.
For a man evidently troubled by what he saw in women, with an attendant agoraphobia, I applaud with a 'bravo' his confrontation of their darker side and through that his expression of humanity, however derivative and misanthropic that expression is. An exhibition at Lausanne's Art Brut would suit perfectly, though his reclusivity would pale alongside the fecund madness on display there.
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