Our Stephff's got loose
Unshackled from 'family newspaper' niceties, The Nation's editorial cartoonist runs wild in his own exhibition
Deryck Whittaker, an English art collector who lives in Bangkok, wrote this preview of Stephff’s show and posted it on Facebook.
Irealise that often my comment on Stephff’s Facebook posting of a latest cartoon is simply a well-merited “Excellent!” or praise for the skill he has of hitting the nail precisely on the head. I suppose what I really want to add is “What fuels all these extraordinary ideas – alcohol, magic mushrooms, weed?” I know first-hand, though, that it takes a lot of persuasion for Stephff (Frenchman Stephane Peray) to accept more than even a single glass of wine at a party.
With “The Dark Side of Stephff’’ exhibition opening at Thavibu Gallery tomorrow, it’s as if, from the cartoons he’s produced for years at The Nation under the limitations of deadlines and editorial, political and social censure, Stephff has been quietly squirreling away the skimmed-off excess of his fertile output. And the fact that he produced the 20 exhibited works in just a few recent weeks confirms the cathartic nature of this enterprise.
When viewing these works it is of course tempting to make references to the prolific political-cartoon output from Stepff’s day job, and undoubtedly they are there, in the sure line, the clear symbolism. The cartoons need to get a message across according to a confined contextual agenda – where the devices of a blue whale, green mamba, Yingluck’s Burberry boots, become familiar to us – and text and colour get us up to speed with the rest of the newspaper still to read. Here, though, Stephff’s now-unfettered pen gives us, with a few exceptions, raw, monochrome images where we are left to fill in the colours, as it were – though red would probably be the colour of choice.
The exhibits fall roughly into three groups, most of the pieces addressing the theme of war.
The largest group consists of mainly monochrome line drawings. The strongest of these, “New Born of War-ism”, shows the Statue of Liberty post-partum with its progeny, a soldier with gun, hard hat and hard-on, still umbilically connected but already out there and ready to kick arse.
In “War-on-Terrorosaurus”, the Twin Towers weep as scimitar-wielding sharks move in for the kill, and a heavy-weapon-toting T-Rex is hell-bent on revenge. In “The Massacre”, Stephff has created a monster of suffering, a Hydra of Guernica supplicating arms and gnashing teeth, where in place of Picasso’s candle-bearing Lucifer an authority figure bites off heads at will, and bayonet-mounted swordfish home in on the terminally writhing mass.
Stephff has allowed colour into a further work, “The Soiling of a Prostitute”. He shows a posse of penises that has snaked its way to a woman’s bedside, and bespattered her in a blizzard of sperm – effectively, a public stoning. The penises are now flaccid, hanging their heads, as well they should.
The forces of consumerism exhort the naked shopper in “The Consumer” to “Spend!” The wheels of the supermarket trolley in which he is effectively a prisoner are inexorably aligned headed for the checkout counter.
In “The Military Coup”, a young girl performs fellatio on a tank commander as an alternative to conflict, the drips from her guttering torch of peace anticipating the imminent ejaculation from the gun turret. However, four figures huddle below, soft and vulnerable and fearful of what tank tracks can do.
Within the second group, his works have been rendered in white on a black background, in what I think of as Stephff’s “Aztec” style, where the figures and objects are filled in with busy doodled micro-circuitry.
In “Grim Reaper of Mass Destruction”, a cyborg kitted out with weaponry polices our world, strides the battlefield, slushing innocents beneath its tank-tread boots and loosing missiles in all directions.
In the last group Stephff has replaced pen with brush and added limited colour to arrive at something more expressionistic, and if anything even more phantasmagorical. In “Casus Belli” a giant rises out of a charnel house and gun barrels replace tongues and breasts and supplement digits.
Stephff’s fascination with tribal carved masks, as seen at his Primitive Art Gallery in Yenakat, has surely contributed to this show – all that primitive spareness and frank display of genitalia. In one piece in his collection, a rice field marking post from Sarawak, I’m sure I spotted the teeth of his Statue of Liberty and her child, the Hydra, the T-Rex and the cyborg.
Stephff’s works are freighted with fantasy, and with the added influences of his genuine concern for human rights, his insistence on the upholding of liberal values, and the necessity of remaining au courant on the status of headline events as demanded of the political cartoonist. The result is a truly unique and heady mix.
STEPHFF NOIR
“The Dark Side of Stephff” opens tomorrow at 5pm at the Thavibu Gallery and continues through August 25. See www.Thavibu.com.
