Peter Flan

Being introduced to Peter Flan* is like meeting algae. His presence moves vaguely before me like a stain in the air, as grey as a prison cardboard. When he talks I feel his breath like a gas leak on my clammy cheek. I wipe away his wet homosexual kisses and take a seat on the jaundiced chez lounge. The man is so horrific he can only be a genius.

I ask him about this inspiration behind his latest collection:

‘When I conceived of this exhibition, I really just wanted to take painting off the canvas, stuff it in a transit van and dump it in the woods...y’know? I wanted my brushstrokes to look drunk and disorderly, like they had leaned on the canvas with their trousers round their ankles and fallen asleep... I wanted to soil the body of painting, so to speak - to mock the Masters, to shit on Cezanne…’

He goes on to discuss his attitude towards painting:

‘I guess the key thing is that I’m always aiming for is a sort of resonance… like last week when I discovered a dead shrew in some tepid dishwater… and my blind hands thought the poor creature was the cloth or the sponge, so I squeezed it dry….y’know? That sort of thing… I want my paintings to make the viewer feel limp… I want my canvases to encapsulate the emotional impact of a sick Victorian child finding an unexplained secretion of mucus in a damp crevice on a feverish Wednesday.’

He stops to offer me a sip from his plate of tea. I decline. My mind is agog, my mouth ajar, my face empty, gaping like a stolen purse. The man truly is a genius.

*One of the most reclusive artists of our time, Peter Flan was jailed in 1998 for smuggling atrophied cats into the country. Atrophied cats are illegal in the UK but farmed openly in Serbian restaraunts, where Flan ordered as many as 15 a week. In court, Flan claimed that his livelihood rested on the procurement of a rare pigment – ‘Tepid Yellow’ - which is manufactured only in atrophied cats and cannot be acquired readily in the UK. He has since been acquitted of all charges.