The lurid colour blasts of Constanze Zikos’ gouache series Pinups (ongoing for over three decades) inherit the perversely wry and clinically precise graphic sensibility of his numerous artistic excursions into interior fabrication (in all senses of that term). But they also quiver with an explosive charge that is neither desultory nor inflammatory. In fact, the term “gouache” fails to prepare one for their toxic-shock colour schemes. The Pinups series mostly features cropped images of posing models, abstracted into faceless silhouettes, and painted in colourful kaleidoscopic shards contained within their outline. These figures are not cut-up in the sense of collage, but are coloured-in with delirious artificiality and unnaturalism.
A visual consistency shines through the most recent iterations of the series: flamingo pink flaming against corn-starch blue; hot rhodamine carving into deepest purple; and gold, silver and bronze (sprinkled or simulated) erupting from matt citron. (Think Wham!’s "Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go" video mashed by 1000 Gecs.) If one reads the body language of the figures, they seem to prance and contort, making love to the photographer’s lens—but the intriguing aspect of these blazing gouaches is that there is neither lens nor model. Constanze has created psychedelic ectoplasms of human figures, embalmed in the printing, stitching, beading and brocading that camouflages any humanness they once may have had. Literally: they are what they wear.
Constanze Zikos’ art has long presented a distinctive take on visuality: his works are highly elasticised when it comes to appropriation, allusion and accretion, stretching into a near but distant past, and pushing into a present obsessed with that past. Pinups possibly refers to the ur-text of put-on glamour, Bowie’s Pin Ups (1973), with its pan-human duo of Bowie and Twiggy reconfigured on the front cover like parasexual Pierrots, their maquillage by Pierre Laroche. (Recorded at the Glam mecca studio, Château d’Hérouville, Pin Ups is Bowie going full-French.) The LP is possibly the shiniest black hole of Pop music about Pop music ever made—or at least, the template for all successive transhistorical, meta-style mash-ups that proliferate with increasing frequency and diminishing span in audiovisual culture. It’s meant to be Bowie’s teenage faves c.1964-1967 deconstructed as Glam, but they are so radically toned and buffed that their plasticity gleams more brightly than any reverence the project might have once held.
The dressage of Constanze’s abstracted figurines to me are like the musical phenomenon of Hyper Pop rendered image — weirdly so, considering how image-obsessed Hyper Pop is. Pinups employs sartorial style that riffs on all the key historical figures in this realm: from Freddie Burretti’s Italo-pimpery, to Vivienne Westwood’s imperial decimations, to Michael Braun’s WWF outrageousness, to Stephen Sprouse’s pseudo-street-style, to Gianni Versace’s palatial hallucinations. And let’s not rely on the past alone: the finery displayed in Constanze’s acidic Gothic brushwork and strangely fluttering shapes particularly reminded me of former Bowie-designer Kansai Yamamoto’s gene-splicing streetwear collection by him and his protégé, Quenta Takaya—staged on the Shibuya crossing past midnight during the COVID-19 shut-down Tokyo Fashion week of 2021, with no audience, zero traffic, and live-streamed as a ghostly catwalk.
The key stratagem now historiographically attributed to Pop Art is that it somehow lassos popular culture imagery, temporarily taming it as if it has instantly transformed an image into a taxidermized beast roaming beyond the gallery. Pin-ups will certainly attract a ‘Popist’ label, which is fair enough. But Constanze’s series does more than capture and tame the feral animals of popular culture. By starting from the premise of tearing out images from fashion and style magazines (irrespective of whether this is the precise technical method he employs) the series sets up a gallery of living holographic energies of its human-like figures. Their heady interiors — all carnivalesque fireworks of clashing colours — intimate the weird, nervous energy of people dressing up to go out. This isn’t about ‘fashionistas’ hiding behind masks, poses, vogues or personae, but about revealing the wonderful mess inside people who know how to live it up.
Getting giddy looking at the gorgeous figures in Pinups, I’m reminded of their exact opposite: the flat black silhouettes of alts, hipsters, coolios, wannabes and rent-a-youths in the advertising campaign for Apple’s iPod between 2003 and 2005. From blinding Times Square mega-screens to pseudo-covert street bill posters, a series of black figures wearing white earbuds wired to a white iPod were frozen in ecstatic states, set against a flat void of block colour, contorting in pleasure as they listened to their ‘fave’ music via Apple’s new MP3 file playback device. It didn’t take much to observe that every figure was crowned with African-American hair and contoured with Black urban finery. Let’s call it ‘blackfaceless’. But let’s also call it out as the figuration of the advertised body as a ‘black hole’: pumped full of energy by corpo-tech control (thankyou iTunes) by channelling content into the audio consumer’s empty shell of existence.
The iPod TV commercials set these black ghosts of overconsumption and faceless identity sashaying, popping, locking, krumping and roller-skating to early 2000s cross-over icons of forced grooviness (Black Eyed Peas, Steriogram, N.E.R.D., Feature Cast, U2, Daft Punk, Ozomatli, Gorillaz). The videos’ desperate dancers spasmodically jerked as if they were specimens pinned on a display board in a museum of hip lifestyle consumption. By comparison, Constanze Zikos’ shimmering painted avatars — posing, not grooving or dancing — are beautiful butterflies, rendered as if we are seeing them with ommatidia capabilities beyond human sight. Frozen specimens pinned to a gallery wall, yes. But never captured.
The most recent paintings in the Pinups series (completed onsite in London in 2024) extrapolate the humming energy of his flamboyant silhouettes into vibrational fields of colour that expand outwards, creating phantasmagorical detonations of lines, swirls, ribbons and curlicues. Think Dr. Strange worming through a K-hole. The figures are smaller within the frame, yet they determine the spatial distribution of all colour. And then there’s a fascinating mini-suite of what might be bondage heads covered in tape, but which evoke 19th objects resembling cornucopia fruit bowls and ornate guilt trophies. Their handles could be ears. No earbuds or iPods needed: these beings are tuned in elsewhere.
Text © Philip Brophy. Images © Constanze Zikos & respective copyright holders.