John Yeadon’s latest artworks, created on computer, announce his slightly surprising fascination with the vocabulary of intricately wrought and patterned mannerist artifacts, in this instance a Louis X1V carpet design, which he has threaded with barely camouflaged figurative insets – snippets of figurative imagery – erect penises – winged penises – eyes and seductive mouths. With this new series of works which is steadily growing, and through which the baroque is ushered in, a different door has been opened which again stresses Yeadon’s penchant for artificial forms of expression. The baroque and rococo define contortion and eccentricity in design. Militia, in 1797, defined it as ‘the ultimate in the bizarre… the ridiculous carried to extremes’. The word ‘rococo’ derives from the French term rocambolesque, which referred to the accumulation of rock-work, shells, plants, and scrolls fashionable in French decoration of the time of Louis XV. In John’s new work the intricate surface offers a superabundance of style and ornament.

It seems to me that Yeadon is beginning to examine vast potentialities for new ways of working – visually, intellectually, historically. Evoked are entangled symbols of sensuality, alcheringa and the wet dream. Perhaps from a more limited and peripheral perspective Yeadon delivers an ironic swipe at the historical predictability of Jeff Koons’ art with its sexual, baroque and rococo paraphernalia and its associations with the so-called ‘post-modern’. John emphasizes les astuces du metier.

Experiment as this phase of Yeadon’s work appears to be an added difficulty for the spectator rests in the comical sense of uncertainty we feel concerning the plausibility of intellectual accessibility released by this new imagery – a feeling made uncomfortable by the peculiar and yet apparently unremarkable coincidence of the collaged additions. Elements of the ornamental surface are playfully mimed by the new sections of collage, and the fact that on close inspection various penises seem to airily float like ghostly putti, allowing the ‘ground’ to feature through them, while others stand erect and appear as tactile as doorknobs, while yet others appear to threaten penetration into portions of the pattern, attests to Yeadon’s stress on rendering a close reading of the mannerist nomenclature of excess displayed in the carpet design. Sexuality and playfulness underpin and undermine the image, weaving its texture into a web of artifice, praising an original ingenuity idealised by excess and restoring sanity and real academicism through insult and iconographical graffiti. Text books on the baroque will tell us that the word ‘artificial’ does mean unnatural, crafty, astucieusement and simulated – the word and genre of the ‘grotesque’ was in common usage by the middle of the 16th century and one crucial poet of the grotesque was Francois Rabelais – continuous literary inspiration for Yeadon’s art. Bakhtin’s ‘modern masterpiece’ Rabelais and his World* is a tome close to John’s heart, from which I quote:

“The flowering of grotesque realism is a system of images created by the medieval culture of folk humour, and its summit is the literature of the Renaissance. At that time the term grotesque first appears on the scene but in a narrow sense occasioned by the finding at the end of the 15th century of a type of Roman ornament, previously unknown. These ornaments were brought to light during the excavation of Titus’ baths and were called grottesca from the Italian word grotta. Somewhat later similar ornaments were discovered in other areas Italy. [The character of these ornaments]… Impressed the connoisseurs by the extremely fanciful, free, and playful treatment of plant, animal and human forms. These forms seemed to be interwoven as if giving birth to each other. The borderlines that divide the kingdoms of nature in the usual picture of the world were boldly infringed. Neither was there the usual static presentation of reality. There was no longer the movement of finished forms, vegetable or animal, in a finished stable world; instead the inner movement of being itself was expressed in the passing of one form into the other, in the ever incompleted character of being. This ornamental interplay revealed an extreme lightness and freedom of artistic fantasy, a gay, almost laughing libertinage. The gay tone of the new ornament was grasped and brilliantly rendered by Raphael and his pupils in their grotesque decoration of the Vatican Loggias.“ Bakhtin, Mikhail [1965] Rabelais and his World, MIT Press, pp31-32

Ian Hays, October 1999

John Yeadon was born on the same day as Francois Rabelais’ Gargantua, February 3rd, during which time of the year the Mardi Gras celebrations occur.