Raymond Pettibon (b. 1957)

Currently the subject of a major retrospective held at the New Museum, New York, Raymond Pettibon combines text and image to produce work that is by turns bitingly acerbic and hauntingly lyrical. Pettibon’s powerful, graphic visual style was honed in the punk rock scene of the late 1970s and ‘80s – his brother Greg Ginn was the guitarist of the influential hardcore band Black Flag, whose iconic four bars logo Pettibon designed. Yet over the last few decades, Pettibon has honed a distinctive, hybridised visual idiom, appending his drawings with slivers of text that create provocative, ambiguous juxtapositions. An erudite, wide-ranging reader, his investigations into language and image draw from both pulpy pop sources as well as the classical English prose of literary greats like Thomas Browne, Henry James and John Ruskin. In Untitled (2002), Pettibon takes a letter written by Matthew Arnold to his sister, and inscribes it around a delicately calligraphed letter A in a rich red. Removed from its context the text takes on a strange, indecipherable beauty: ‘If you read [the great prose writers] you’ll come across quite a bit… they’re very elaborate, and the sentence structure can elaborate itself into very long paragraphs. But in a fragmentary way. Their work, taken out of context, can mean something completely different, and at the same time it’s so beautifully said’ (R. Pettibon, quoted in J. Lewis, “A Conversation with Raymond Pettibon,” Parkett 47, 1996, p. 58).