Todd James – Yo Ho Ho
Todd James – Damage Incorporated
Todd James, a.k.a. REAS
‘BLOOD & TREASURE’
at Lazarides Gallery London – 29 August – 28 September 2008
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Lazarides Gallery Greek Street is delighted to present an exhibition ofnew work by Todd James, a.k.a. REAS. Blood & Treasure features aseries of over twenty new paintings, as well as a never-before-seenanimated video.
Protest images marked out in cartoon outrage, filled with recycledadvertising cast-offs and corrupted child scrawls, these large-scaleworks of gouache and graphite smash the distance between death andjokes and between the viewer and what he or she probably goes aroundtrying not to know about the present state of things.
But this subject matter—grinning aircraft carriers, lounging blondes,sneaky missiles, beleaguered tanks, and skulls wearing sailor suits—most certainly has a direct connection to reality. Because no matter how fantastical or cartoony the imagery gets, it still presents an array ofproblems that have no immediate solution. James evokes a comic booksense of horror at the modern world and pity for those that live in it,while his ink-black warplanes and battleships have a chunky authoritythat embed themselves permanently in the mind of the viewer. Stealthbombers jack-off over cities, cheered on by bikini models jostling forspace with partying warships, creating a feverish mix of complexmayhem that’s fully apparent in paintings such as ‘DamageIncorporated’, above right, or ‘Yo Ho Ho’, above left.
These works are psychologically and literally unstoppable, in the sensethat the situations they depict are in full swing and degenerating by themoment. They are absurd yet strike a chord of realism. Blood &Treasure is a profound exhibition about the bizarre hybrid of war,commerce, and popular culture that the western world is trying to passoff as democracy, and with it James lays that canard to waste.
Todd James (a.k.a. REAS) is an internationally recognized artist whobegan his career as a child in the New York City subway system, andwho remains one of graffiti’s best-known elder statesmen to this day. Hewas a co-creator of the seminal Street Market exhibition at DeitchProjects in New York, which was selected for the Venice Biennale in2001. James’ work has also been shown at the Institute ofContemporary Art in Philadelphia, the Tate Museum in Liverpool, theParco gallery in Tokyo, and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in SanFrancisco, amongst other venues. Todd James lives and works in NewYork City.
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