As the art world descends upon Paris for FIAC, there are a bunch of good shows popping up around the French capital. As always, we are drawn to a Raymond Pettibon show, and the NYC artist just opened Frenchette at David Zwirner's space in Paris.
The artist's almost stream-of-consciousness style is a signature, where baseball, surfing, cartoons and politics are all intertwined and blended together in a messy but elegant presentation and body of work. The show is Pettibon's first in Paris since 1995 while inaugurating the gallery’s space in Paris at 108, rue Vieille du Temple.
The gallery notes: "The works on view feature both entirely new subjects for the artist as well as characters and motifs that Pettibon has returned to often. Recurring figures and themes include Gumby, baseball, US presidents, animals, totalitarian dictators, and waves, among others. In the works depicting Gumby, Pettibon recodes the wide-eyed innocence of the classic children’s television character as strung-out paranoia. One work, No Title (John Ford directed …), shows Gumby wearing a cowboy hat and riding his sidekick, the orange horse Pokey. To the left of the figures, Pettibon has written ‘John Ford directed: Irish riding the Protestants’, comically merging Gumby with John Wayne, the star of many of Ford’s famous westerns, while injecting the contentious religious opposition between Irish Catholics and Protestants through the symbolism of the colors of green and orange."
