Noel Skrzypczak and Guy Benfield
Abstract Expressionism held that painting was not meant to be beautiful but rather true - to embody intuitive, singular and personal expressions of the unshakeable truth of the self. The emotionally-charged gestural abstractions of Noel Skrzypczak, and Guy Benfield's cross-disciplinary painting performances engage with such rhetoric, as well as mimicking the formal qualities of 'action painting', including the expressive gesture to end them all - the drip. They are of course not the first artists to tum towards Abstract Expressionism. Almost as soon as the fortunes of the movement waned, artists began to rework its forms . And the drip continues to be tapped in contemporary practice.1 It is an obstacle of art history that is difficult to hurdle: that neither the pre-eminence of painting, nor the primacy of the artist figure has ever been so strong again, might partly explain its ongoing intrigue, particularly for painters.
But the cool and conceptual stance of most Ab Ex satire is absent from the work of Noel Skrzypczak and Guy Benfield. It is the self-consciously vulgar excess of their work that provokes such mixed responses-outrageously expressive and all together too emotionally charged.
Their messy abstractions owe just as much to the puerile-play aesthetics of Paul McCarthy and Mike Kelley, or even Hany Armanious. They amplify the overblown and garish visual qualities of mid-century American abstraction and pleasure in the watered down forms of the moderne. Their aesthetics push the limits of taste and confuse divergent categories of style beyond the realms of comprehension.
Noel Skrzypczak's abstractions are anything but cool. A mismatched melange of signwriter neon blended with bland domestic hues, the sort of tints one might find in half empty cans... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline