Trevor Brown, image from Li’l Miss Sticky Kiss Editions Treville & Pan Exotica, Tokyo 2004
Dear PINK’s
Trevor Brown is another englishman (after Lafcadio Hearn) that blended so deeply into japanese culture that sometimes seems more japanese than Japanese themselves. I came across his work for the first time in the late 90’s, when Melisa (my beautiful sister in law, in her early twenties back then) was suffering from Brown Fever. The peculiar blend of Kawaii, gore, BDSM, fetish and kitsch fitted perfectly the Zeitgeist of post-modern / early internet era. Is Brown’s art sick and perverted? Surely it is, as much as the work of many other contemporary artists: Toshio Saeki, Mark Ryden or Chapman Brothers to mention only a couple of loosely related cases. His paintings often remind me of Gottfried Helnwein‘s medical fetish pieces – just with a lot more of lipstick and gloss topping. The phenomena of Brown may be seen as even more disturbing because the perversion as source of delight appears so bare, so evident and so drastic in his work but finally it is a part of the same cultural dynamic. Dynamic that originates in post holocaust / post atomic value crisis, general numbing / growing thirst for the extraordinary, rebel routines, domestication of the taboos (with it’s cathartic, orgiastic and commercial aspects); in the whole bizarre pop-cultural landscape that lies behind us – those are the landmarks in our contemporary consciousness. The encounter between art and sexuality, West and East surely produces vicious mutations.
PINK NOT DEAD!
maurycy
Trevor Brown, Li’l Miss Sticky Kiss Editions Treville & Pan Exotica, Tokyo 2004
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