Justin Fitzpatrick

"I walk down a promenade. It is called ‘Le Chant des Hommes', the song of men. There is a water feature here also, a highly unusual one. Two walls of gleaming copper line the pathway, around 3 metres high. The walls extend roughly 50 metres down the pathway. With a gap of about 1 metre between them and standing on either side of the pathway are men. There must be a hundred of them, hired from the local village for events such as this. I believe they perform on special days, royal birthdays and the like. They stand each facing the wall, their trousers around their ankles, their bare asses facing whomever walks by.

On each section of the wall, around knee height, is a bell, which these men can ring by urinating on it. An aura of piss oxidizes the copper around each bell. The copper seems to amplify the bells ringing, and it is said that the men play beautiful waltzes to entertain the passing nobility. I must register as nothing of the sort to them however, for as I walk down ‘Le Chant des Hommes' all I get is corrupt disharmony, a jangling atonal cacophony. Perhaps they can sense that I am not like my fellow courtiers. They are leering at me as I pass, eyes moving away from their own dicks to look over their shoulders at me in scorn."

- Excerpt from French Garden, exhibition text by J. Fitzpatrick

Justin Fitzpatrick’s practise encompasses painting, sculpture, installation and written text. For his first solo exhibition, Fitzpatrick will show works under the title F-R-O-N-T-I-S-P-I-E-C-E. The title is most commonly associated with the allegorical image that faces a books title page, though it originates as an architectural term to describe the facade of a building. If a frontispiece is a summation of the themes contained within a text, then the images and recurring motifs in Fitzpatrick’s work point the viewer to the relationship between the body and the house, to the thought of the body as vessel or container, and ultimately to the subject of metaphor itself, the nesting of one concept inside another. The artist cites George Lakoff & Mark Johnson’s Metaphors We Live By (2003) as an influential text, which describes metaphoric language as rooted in the physical relationship we have to the world, that which in turn structures our relationship to the world. It evokes the idea of language as something contiguous to the body.

Justin Fitzpatrick lives and works in London. Recent group exhibitions include Streams of Warm Impermanence, David Roberts Art Foundation, London; Amazing Girls / It’s Complicated, KevinSpace, Vienna; Bloomberg New Contemporaries, ICA, London.