Pricasso

Sucidal Oil Piglet: The Womb
22 February

The artist Timothy James Francis Patch was born in 1949 in Weymouth, England. His mother was Australian and warm. His father was English. In his youth, Patch studied art before training as a builder. In 1977, he migrated to Australia. He currently lives and works in Lower Beechmont, in the hinterlands of the continent's East Coast. One key component of Patch's artistic practice today is the long-running construction and maintenance of a distinctive family home on his rural property. It is a striking, amorphously organic structure, with a single, watchful, blue eye—Gatsby's T. J. Eckleburg billboard tripped out and transplanted. Another component is his work produced under the alias "Pricasso."


As Pricasso, Tim transforms: from an average hinterlands retiree—bald, crinkly-eyed, fond of riding around his pond on a tractor—to another being entirely. Pricasso has a flamboyant manner, a shock of blonde hair (a Warholian wig, but more straw-toned, more Queensland), and scanty, fluorescent pink outfits, including a signature cowboy-brimmed top hat. He has a tight, tanned body and a cheeky smile. His website says that he is the "world’s only artist who paints portraits with his penis." His OnlyFans makes both a more and less modest claim, noting that "there are millions of artists in the world but only a few paints with a penis. Pricasso was the first and still the best."


Pricasso is moderately famous for dipping his semi-erect cock in paint and using it as a flesh-brush. His paintings are Impressionistic in style, saturated in colour palette, and feature recurring subjects: vaudevillian self-portraits in costume, ocean waves, commissioned portraits (of attendees of hen's parties, sex expos, nudist gatherings, and the like), and political commentary of an anti-authoritarian bent. Pricasso, like the French revolutionary satirist Honoré Daumier before him, is sceptical of corrupt, power-hungry strongmen. Unlike Daumier, he expresses this critique with his penis. It is probably important to note somewhere here that he often ejaculates onto his canvases. One could draw links to art historical narratives about male artists attempting to inject their work with rutting libidinal vitality, or one could take a more universalist approach. Nearly all contemporary art is a form of narcissistic public wanking—some people are just more honest about it than others.


Freud described the dream of nakedness, wherein the dreamer appears exposed in front of a crowd of shadowy figures, as an “exhibition dream.” He believed it was, like all dreams, wish fulfillment—the dream of nakedness is a subconsciously manufactured scenario wherein it becomes possible to recreate the childhood experience of being nude in public without shame. Childhood is a paradise lost, said Freud. In dreams of nakedness, the dreamer experiences the pleasure of a return to the child's exhibitionism, free of the embarrassment of its consequences in bourgeois, adult waking life. Pricasso is a rare artist; he is living the dream. It is only fitting that, for his most significant retrospective to date, his paintings be returned to the womb.


Text by Cameron Hurst.