Albert Pepermans - The pleasure of painting

In 2020, Albert Pepermans will not slow down. Energetic, brutal, direct, impulsive, averse to rules, unpolished and a powerful use of colour. These are the characteristics that splash from his work, whether figurative or abstract. Which does not alter the fact that is can be melancholic or subdued at the same time. His painting and performances are rooted in the turbulent sixties: pop art, anarchist happenings and rock ‘n’ roll. He also loved Dada, underground cartoons and later on the Neue Wilde such as Baselitz and Immendorf. But he even fell more for anarchy of punk, that short-lived explosion at the end of the seventies. The raw energy of rock ‘n’ roll and the brutality of punk he never really lost in his art. For the sake of convenience, he is regularly given the predicate/label ‘painter’ for his name, but ordinary brushes and canvas are seldom, if ever, in his arsenal of materials. Most of the time he works on paper. In the eighties he breaks through internationally with large works, often on very thin sewing pattern paper. Often a brutal figuration and a sharp vision of man in a metropolitan environment.

SERRIES PAINTER

The pleasure of painting was no longer ‘not done’ when neo-expressionism emerged in the eighties. In the seventies when Albert Pepermans threw himself into his own work, it was quite revolutionary to swear by it. He studies graphic arts in Sint-Lukas Brussels and worked as an illustrator and designer for the free-spirited weekly Humo. As graphic designer he realized annexes on musicians such as Bob Dylan and the Stones. A 9-to-5 job did not suit him. For a while he was a freelancer and then he became an art teacher. This way he had the freedom to do his own thing.

After his first solo exhibition, in 1979 at Camille von Scholz in Brussels, things went fast. He exhibited solo at the Museum of Fine Arts in Brussels (1987), in the Documenta Archiv in Kassel (1992), in the Martin Gropius Bau in Berlin (1994), in Paris, New York, Sweden and on Art Basel (1989) with Camille von Scholz, who closed her gallery in Brussels in 1997. In 2011, his three collaborative projects with Hugo Claus form the nineties once again received much acclaim at the well-attended Art Festival Watou. ‘Series painter’ Albert Pepermans had added another sixty new paintings.

OUTSIDE THE LINES

The artist was never afraid to cut loose. From the beginning he also liked to show his work outside of the art space. His performances were equally successful. The most legendary is ‘Rock-and-Roll party’ (1882) in the Halls of Schaarbeek. The audience drove around in bumper cars, an attraction with projections of his rock paintings on the wall. In the second space the artist danced to rock music in a boxing ring with plastic walls, a self-made cage. It was a exhausting performance of 45 hours, while his heartbeat was pounding through the loudspeakers. Everything for Art. Sometimes unannounced and often as a painter. A gallery in New York in 1985 was temporarily a hairdresser’s salon where he painted mini-paintings on the crown of the head. Whoever wanted that had them cut out to hang on the wall. In the Cirque d’Hiver in Paris and the Centre Pompidou (1982), the audience/ public drummed together behind plastic walls, on which he painted portraits by following the contours of people standing against them. Another very direct way of portrait painting, but with more daredevilry was a performance at a castle pond in Zaventem, then his hometown. A man stood in front of a white canvas at the pond. Armed with two bags of paint, the artist left in a costume with water wings around his arms from the roof top of the castle. He rushed down along a cable and splashed into the pond. But not before he had thrown the bags at the canvas. He repeated the action until the model was completely covered in paint. The pleasure of painting also splashed from performances.

ORDER AND CHAOS

Albert Pepermans constantly plays with fields of tension. Order and chaos, this duality cannot be removed from his painting. He performed it live in 1994. In a gallery in Sweden he stamped sheets of paper on the floor with a black motif, at equal distances from each other. Blindfolded, he tried to stamp that motif in red in the same place, which resulted in a jumble/ tangle of black and red. He often uses self-made stamps in his paintings. He picks subjects from his surroundings, anywhere in the world. He became famous/ well-known with ‘rock ‘n’ roll’ paintings: portraits of pop and rock icons, in which he searched for the person behind the public figure. He was busy with cartoon figurer like Tarzan and Mickey Mouse, and he loved Crumb’s underground cartoons. In 1985 he was enormously impressed by Berlin and New York. The dynamics of world cities came into his work, the solitude of man in the metropolis, skyscrapers, cars and airplanes. As a child he played at the military airport and later when he lived near Brussels Airport, he liked to hang out at night in the large departure hall from the time of Expo ’58.

PARIS

In the eighties and nineties Albert Pepermans had many exhibitions and performances in Paris. It earned him the nickname ‘le fou belge’, ‘the crazy Belgian’. He felt that the city radiated something aggressive at that time. Which is again the case because of the recent riots and protests. When he received a book with old photographs of Paris, a series of large works about the city started in 1987, all painted on sewing pattern paper measuring 1.5 by 2 meters. He like to use that yellowish paper to cut sewing patterns as a carrier. It was sold folded in supermarkets. The folds play a role, and when the work is mounted on canvas it gets wrinkles and creases. He used to pin paintings on that fragile paper in exhibitions with pins on the wall, and even transported them folded.
‘Notre Dame’ (1987) is a portrait of a lady with the iconic west façade of Notre Dame in the distance. What is that red-black speckled oval behind the head? Steamships sail in circles on the contours. At the very top ‘une belle hispano’ is written. ‘Place de la belle-Hispano’, that’s the name of a square in Paris. Figures with a large head and a small body almost became a trademark of Pepermans in that period. Also typical are the disorderly perspective and the black lines, so that the work looks partly like a woodcut or linocut. Still a kind of graphic work, realized in a much faster way. Other metropolitan scenes of 1987 are mostly night views.

TWO FLOWERS

‘Two Flowers in a Vase’ (1997) is a work on sewing pattern paper measuring 2 by 2 meters. One half is mainly painted with a black and white checkerboard pattern in the planes of the folds, with motifs underneath. In the other half, white planes partly cover a large vase with two flowers. It is painted with kitchen oil, which penetrated into the thin paper. Abstraction and figuration go hand in hand in a painting about the fading of the past, of memories, of happiness too. In the middle two small motifs are stamped with red paint. One is the vase with two flowers and the other looks like a Pepermans tower. The artist makes his own symbols and there are motifs that return. In 1991 he stamped a vase with two flowers on sheets of paper measuring 4 by 8 meters. These works hung over the windows of the Campo Santo chapel in Ghent. As a finissage Albert Pepermans lit a fire indoors and burned the whole series in ‘The Burning Performance’. Especially to demonstrate that an artist always remains master of his own work.

- Christine Vuegen