«LOUIS»

Louis Vuitton opened his trunk workshop in Paris in 1854. In 1892 he died, and four years later, in 1896, his son Georges launched the monogram canvas with interlocking initials, small flowers and stars. It was meant as a tribute to his father, and it was also a way to stop copyists. A logo was invented to protect a product, and it became the product.

That is the starting point of this painting. I wanted fashion pop art about what happens when the sign is louder than the thing it was made for.

A figure with a green and yellow face and a blue hood throws one yellow arm up into the air. Her red lips are the only calm detail. Small monogram-like letters sit on her eyes, with a black bar through them. The arm breaks into glitch streaks, and flat blocks of red, orange and yellow cut across the canvas. On the right, an orange patch in the shape of a body is packed with fashion-house names and logos, repeated like wallpaper and cut here and there by black bars. In the top left corner a faint monogram pattern of letters and little stars fades into the dark.

The black bars and flat colour planes remind me of Malevich, who showed his Black Square in 1915. Warhol put a logo on canvas in 1962 with his Campbell's soup cans, thirty-two of them, one for each flavour. I like that a soup can and a luxury label end up in the same place, on a wall. I wanted to make contemporary pop art from that idea. Fashion pop art where the figure is built from brand names.

This original pop art painting is 105x90 cm on canvas, and it would work as statement wall art in a room that likes colour. This original is still available and ready to ship. Most of my other originals are already in private collections, and I paint new ones to order in any size. A hand-finished lithograph of this work also exists, and you can order it through Instagram or email.