Sir “PEPEH” De Alcaniz Van Mekinnensa

Abdul Vas’ work reminds us with a visual fierceness of how quotidian culture and art can be transformed into a volatile, revolutionary concoction. His conflation of so-called “low brow” entertainment with his distinct, artistic practice has run the gamut from works that reference Australian mega-rock band AC/DC, to the American major league baseball team Cincinnati Reds, as well as the American porn star Sasha Grey, and other characters that often populate society’s margins. The diverse media that Vas deploys, from which his iconography manifests, include large-scale painting, photography, work-on-paper, and installation.

His paintings, for example, are a confluence of aesthetic elements: aggressive, violent, and ostensibly marked by a frenetic handling of pigment, they nonetheless have an elegance to them that creates a formal tension within each work’s pictorial space. Vas’ art is generally figurative, though he does incorporate a myriad of other elements including text and symbols. In doing so, he charges his creations with an intensity that adds narrative layers subsequently configuring works that are open-ended rather than what at first appearance may be straightforward or singular in their meaning. Observe, for instance, his Cincinnati Reds series. In each of these paintings Vas has depicted a nightmarish rendition of the famed baseball team via what are ostensibly individual players. As a corpus, the single figures collectively constitute a kind of lineup of the demented; a cavalcade of scars; in short, a team from hell. Yet the individual team members are not identified, which leads one to believe that what Vas is depicting is an archetype of the Cincinnati Reds or even baseball in general? Are these gargantuan and threatening ogres some sort of fantasy or nightmare of what has been described historically as America’s past time and gift to the world?

Baseball today, however, is so universal that it is played all over the planet and its expertise can be found in geographically disparate areas including the shanties of Puerto Rico to the make shift fields of any Asian country. But by focusing on a specific American team, what is it that Vas is conveying to us? For the way he depicts them are menacing and inundated with a hyper-sexuality that borders on the pornographic. The re-contextualization of the Cincinnati Reds baseball player as some kind of twisted incubus is an example of testosterone gone amok. Looming larger than life and Neanderthal-like, these daunting paintings are within a complicated lineage of figuration from the past 100 years. The diverse and broad trajectory detected goes as far back to the Expressionists, particularly to the work of Emil Nolde.