Ashley Bickerton

I don’t remember when I first saw Ashley’s work. But I do remember seeing it in London at the Tate Pop Life show and thinking it would be interesting to attempt to continue his body of work in my own way. It took me about 4 years to figure this out and, by the time I was 33 in 2013, I was in production for my first work that would attempt this.

I’ve never tried to hide this fact and Ashley and I even joke around about it. He says that, out of all the artists who’ve ripped him off, I was his favorite.

Ashley is a strange version of an artist who’s been through so much. If you’ve met him, he can be very childlike and innocent and charmingly vulnerable and insecure in the best way - the kind of insecurity that keeps someone curious, open and hungry. He googles a lot - but wait, he’s pure!

The works in this show are abrasive in their theatricality - which is good. In many ways these works are repulsive and difficult. In other ways they're exactly what we’ve asked for: a clear witnessing of our own corruption. Ashley depicts the horrid spoiling of ourselves and the beautiful earth. I’m not into morals in art. In life I’m often terrified or ashamed, but in art I believe we have the chance to be free, even if momentarily - a sudden breaking of the all present anxiety and trauma into a slow and still floating of seeing without thinking.

These works have rhythm. I like how he repeats his name, it feels flirtatious. I like his heroic script signature as if he were some legendary pro-surfer you’ve only seen posters of surfing the crest of a giant threatening wave. I also like the wood frames, as if I’m being welcomed into some dumb and chic surf shop run by an old white stoner who moved to the island when he was 39 and now is 60. There’s a sleeping dog on the floor and a hot chick working behind a Point of Sale tablet device.

Ashley is good at objects. He’s good at gear. It’s all so masculine and decisively handsome. Can you feel it? I feel it. It’s very clear and sharp. It’s confident, too. It’s also sexual, but not in a way that is actually engaged in sex. It feels more “after sex” or “before sex”. Ashley denies being masculine or sexual because he doesn’t see himself as clearly as we do, but the work speaks for itself and his seminal artworks were of course titled “self portraits” large handsome athletic self-aware threatening, but of course not, wall objects. For someone whose work was so large and present, Ashley paradoxically saw himself as so small and vulnerable. Ironically when he was young he was as handsome and virile as a young Marlon Brando. I’ve never been so good looking that it distracted me or others but I can imagine for a smart young sensitive person, born into the world where and how Ashley was, it was more than a novel distraction and instead an obstacle he felt pressure to live up to. Ashley was cast as the prototypical white Anglo Saxon male of the 1980s despite himself. This casting created part of the tension that generated his seminal works. He longed to been seen as the novel heroic leading man but in fact he was a fragile self consciousness person that dreamed to escape the urban life that terrorized him and return to a state of presence and harmony in some version of the colonizers paradise he grew up in. Unconsciously speaking, through, the art he illustrated this anxiety by including safety equipment that appears “new” and “fashionable” but in fact served to rescue the artist from a world unsafe and unbearable. It’s not surprising he finally escaped New York for Bali and with that a profound shift in the hubris of the work occurred. Suddenly it wasn’t the tension between hellish urban life and paradise but instead now the tension between paradise and the depressing truth behind paradise.

I think Ashley may have thought his art would make the world a better place or hoped that he’d feel better in it after making these statements. If that’s true he’s failed. If anything the world is worse and more defeated now that Ashley showed us all its hypocrisy and his own fragility wrapped around it. But the world is better because he’s added to the chaos. He’s added to the confirming we are a greedy horny hostile lying species full of non dualisms that make us just exactly bearable.

—Jordan Wolfson, January 2022