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| Press & Writings On Cypher
"Cypher spends a lot of time thinking about sex
– which may make him unique among artists, but certainly not among
men…[Cypher] is a multi-faceted 29-year-old who thrives on his complexity,
much like a difficult adolescent. He has been so busy trying to convince
the world of his genius over the years that he has failed to focus hard
enough on his art style or complete an art degree…Cypher handed
me his CV when we met; it details the trials and traumas of his life as
if he was the world’s most famous artist and not one who has just
got his first break. He takes himself and his life rather seriously…[He]
christened himself Cypher (meaning “nonentity”) back in 1991,
at a time when he felt a complete failure, both as a man and as an artist.
He also calls himself The Panic Artist – because he says, we are
living in a time of panic for men. I suppose it makes sense for an artist
with a borderline personality disorder to have two alter egos instead
of just one…Cypher has to learn that art is as much about skill
as ideas. To clinch a place in the collectors' hearts he needs a more
consistent style. “Rejection has made me bitter,” he says.
It’s a shame success hasn’t changed that." “Is there is [Sic] sufficient redemptive power
in Cypher’s work to offset the offense, and even pain, which it
will cause to some? Is it art? I think so. But both artist and viewer
are in some way vulnerable when facing these images. Cypher manages, at
times, to produce a quieter category of work: drawings, for example, of
great power, of understated, lyrical beauty. It is these that make me
wonder about his “transgressive” work: wonder if behind that
the [Sic] riot of provocation, passion and porn, there might be a great
sensitivity and above all vulnerability. Cypher’s story is as remarkable
as his art. I was baffled by his persistence, creating hundreds of canvases
over dozens of years, in the face of rejection after rejection. The words
and images in Cypher’s work are disarmingly and perhaps uniquely
frank about personal feelings, vulnerabilities and experiences. The longer
I looked, the more determined I became to understand the motivation and
philosophy behind it all… "Ireland's colonial past, and our inheritance of
a bizarre Jansenist/Victorian variant on Catholicism, creates further
opportunities for emasculation. Many writers and artists have depicted
the colonised sate as an impotent or impoverished man; some (most notably
O`Casey) represented that emasculation both literally and metaphorically.
The "hero" of Juno and the Paycock, for example, is a swaggering
tribute to the frustrated ambitions of the disenfranchised Irish father-figure…
[Cypher] continues a parallel exploration of the other, counterpart option:
become a Feminised Man… But the Irish woman has shown as little
interest as any other in Feminised Man. Feminisation was offered to the
modern male as the kiss of life, a way of allowing him to remain viable
when machines had made traditional machismo embarrassing and anachronistic.
Yet the feminist kiss of life turned out to be the kiss of death. Female
Man`s sexual unviabilty is now routinely affirmed in words of withering
mockery (wimp; wus; pussy)… On one level, it is possible to read
Cypher`s own coming of age, sexually and artistically, as a metaphor for
the coming of age of the State. Self-Portrait with My mother in Florida…
Crams into a single image a remarkable parable of how the Irish have handled
this rite of passage: The "couple" assert their independence
from British cultural norms by plunging into American pop culture: attending
a Florida theme park and even, in young Cypher`s case; wearing the uniform
appropriate to the War of Independence. Bur Cypher`s message is superbly
ambiguous: yes, he joins his mother in finding freedom in ex-colonial
America - but he also uses the occasion to dress up in adult gear, thereby
asserting his independence from his mother. The fact that both participants
assume an earnest, even somber expression (in the fun setting of a carnival
booth) only emphasizes the gravity of the event: the schism is touched,
for both sides, with pain and remorse… To.. critics, Cypher`s meditations
on pornography belong with the bad skin, the lonely passions and all the
other embarrassments and impediments of youth. Yet the extraordinary Dear
Woman series.. offers, on its own, more than enough to answer such charges.
It is too startling, original and thought-provoking to be dismissed as
juvenilia… Cypher an adult male, burdened with the familiar cultural
and anthropological imperatives, is telling us about his own short comings
and failures, today. His complaints, confessions and regrets are precise
and specific. He is letting the side down. He is letting women in on the
secrets of the battered male psyche. He is even perhaps, decoding for
women the terror and insecurity behind empty male machismo… In Librium,
an individual woman fixes the individual viewer with her gaze. The sheer
size of the work (it is nearly six feet high) means there is no escape.
Her eyes are inviting, not, as in Demoiselles [ d`Avignon 1906-7] contemptuous…
Cypher does just enough… to shatter any notion of a conventionally
romantic/erotic, private intimacy… her confident expression suggests
a disconcerting grasp, on her part, of the workings of male desire."
"For years he was the flying Dutchman of the Irish
art scene, rumoured to exist in a bleak world of nihilism and pornography,
heard but not seen. He was the kind of artist other artists used to frighten
their children with at bed time… [His] attitude to sex is remote,
distasteful and uniquely Irish. The artist’s may claim that his
work is about the emasculation of men and their confusion about their
place in modern society now that feminists have realised they don’t
want feminised men. But there is nothing in the visual work itself to
explain that position. What we see is not, contrary to what some observers
believe, demeaning to women. It is simply demeaning to sex. There is no
joy in the work…. It’s a pity that the use of pornographic
magazines will become the focal point of the exhibition because some of
his paintings are wonderful." "I first met [Cypher] in 1993 when he was a scarcely
socialised young guy whose manic conversation was peppered with an eyebrow-raising
sweep of literary and artistic references, most of which he had consumed
in complete isolation. "He writes of the angst he suffered during his teenage
years and his love/hate relationship with women, pretty much exactly what
you’d expect from a tortured artist. However; who is the more tortured
– the artist or those that must look at his work? That all depends
on your point of view; [Cypher’s] work shrieks from the wall, drowning
the onlooker with his anguish… The collection would perhaps be more
powerful if it wasn’t attacking the viewer from every angle. And
no matter how the subject-matter of some of the work is talked up, it
is still extremely uncomfortable for most women to peruse paintings depicting
explicit images of gaping vaginas or a female performing fellatio on three
penises, no matter how masterly the composition or the brush-strokes of
the artist. [Cypher] describes his art as cathartic although it more closely
resembles a form of purging in an attempt to abolish the demons that haunt
him. Displaying his struggle so publicly and graphically may help him,
but it is uncertain how the public at large is educated, illuminated or
entertained by his efforts." "The screaming self-portraits from the mid-1990`s…
are delirious with agonized paint splashes, a visualized explosion of
emotion and pain, the pornographic collages; all present us with images
to which it is very difficult not to have an almost purely emotional reaction
at first. This conflict between mental and emotional reaction to some
of these pieces is powerful; disgust and desire to look again battle it
out, we find ourselves put in the position of a voyeur, invited to take
one more look…. Cypher has chosen honesty over aesthetics. Susan
Sontag describes Bataille`s work as "an erotics of agony"; Cypher
might just be his visual counterpart. He has painted the erotics of agony…
the confessional style takes on a darker edge when you realise that far
from the freedom and control or realizing visually his fantasies, Cypher
paints copies and in the most telling cases collages someone else's fantasies,
fantasies shared by a huge anonymous male readership, thus reducing the
user of such pornography to a slavish worship of unreal constructions.
Looking at the huge canvases it's difficult not to feel that the people
exploited and demeaned the most by pornography are the who men use it,
substituting real emotions and real women with a safe though lonely pastime."
"Much of his own life story is bleak. His journey,
as is clear from his various texts as well as his paintings, is one of
continuous, monotonous rejection. From his earliest work in the 1980`s
to the show Twenty Years of Panic Art in November 2000, he managed to
sell not one single painting, drawing or collage. The exhibition changed
all that: over fifty works were sold, including an enormous orgy triptych,
Dialectic of Emotion (1995), which changed hands for a five-figure sum.
Until recently, Cypher`s work has been seen as too pornographic or transgressive
to show. Every move he made was circumscribed by this fact. Over and over
again, he encountered - even in the art-world elite - a kind of Pavlovian
reaction to genitals, copulating couples, collaged pornography and other
taboo imagery. But there was, I found, a curiously desultory quality to
those "anti" reactions. People spoke up merely to get their
objections out of the way. Often, their misgivings appeared to have a
second-hand, half-hearted quality to them. “[Cypher] reckons that he's spent the best part
of 20 years living and working in his bedroom-art studio. "I've been
denounced as a lazy waster," he says. "I spent 20 years of my
life alone, no money, no recognition, no social life." But now, as
Cypher/ The Panic Artist, [Cypher] has put his talent in the shop window
by re-creating his bedroom on the floor of the Oisin Gallery. Until Saturday,
he will live and work under the watchful eye of the public. [He] adopted
the name Cypher in 1991. "I was very depressed," he recalls.
"I tried to commit suicide. Cypher means a non-person. If I am a
non-entity I will make a virtue out of the fact. All my art is about that.
"Every human being is flawed. You can either hide from your flaws
and pretend you're something you're not or you can simply say, 'This is
who I am'." His health is better these days. "I haven't attempted
suicide for eight years," he says jauntily. For this show, Cypher
has recreated his living space in the gallery in Westland Row. He's got
his TV, hi-fi and CD`s. His favourite pictures are on the walls. His bed
is surrounded by books and video cassettes. They're almost all hardcore
porn - source material for many of his disturbing and explosive paintings.
"Cypher is preoccupied with making public what is private,"
explains gallery curator Paul O` Kelly. "His fantasies are mainstream.
It is his talent and his utter frankness that make Cypher unique."
On Tuesday his show was attracting above average numbers. Many viewers
took time to talk to the artist as he sat on his bed. For Cypher, the
work of art is the entire process, not the fame or the finished product.
"It's the painting and me interacting with people, " he says.
His Oisin gallery debut show last year was a commercial success with over
£20,000 worth of paintings and drawings, many of them of garish
reproductions of genitalia, bought by collectors."
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"Here,
Keith Haring and some ur-macho expressionism fights it out with old-style
painting in what almost looks like a group show, so changing are [Cypher’s]
own voices. [Cypher] takes on portraiture and the world of sleaze with
some gusto, but varying convictions… Downstairs, quasi-erotic works
play with porno-mag images, with little of the danger, threat or tingles
that can make such work worthwhile… You sense [Cypher] has something
to say and the basic means to say it; it is now a matter of deciding which
voice is his own."
I
had always deferred to Paul O’Kelly in matters of art history –
but now I had found someone more than ready to give him a run for his
money! Cypher’s knowledge of his subject was encyclopedic…
He cited influences as far back as the Renaissance, and shows as recent
as last week: New York, London, Berlin – whatever was on, Cypher
knew about it, talked about it and had sent away for the catalogue…
All this bolstered my conviction, first prompted by his drawings, that
he was to be taken seriously. The large erotic canvases are undoubtedly
tougher, and for obvious reasons more open to attack (see Unacceptable
by Olive Braiden overleaf). Have I made friends with these huge copulating
nudes? Certainly not. Yet I have been startled to discover, looking at
those terrible, frantic orgies of flesh, reflections of images which float,
freely and openly as we speak, in the collective unconscious.” 
"The
scope, range and technique evident in Cypher`s work is undeniably impressive:
this is not an artist one can dismiss out of hand. However, his use, often
quite raw, of pornographic and therefore highly problematic source material
is simply unacceptable… Most troubling are the collages, of which
No Host… would be among the most confrontational examples…
He may well feel the need, for reasons of irony, comment or context, to
quote the cliches of transgressive eroticism: genital fetishisation, lesbian
exhibitionism… But he is not so much quoting as representing. Images
are cut out and pasted down, framed but unedited by the surrounding paint,
crayon and pastel. None of this source material could have been created
without exploitation, danger and degradation…Often I find myself
revisiting and revising my initial reactions. Some paintings, for example
Solipsist, come back to me again and again, at times as erotic, at times
as exploitative - and it is this latter characteristic that makes them
unacceptable…I hope I'm not alone in being somewhat bewildered and
overwhelmed by Cypher`s imagery - two firm convictions remain: First,
I find the direct use of pornographic magazines deeply offensive; and
second Cypher appears to have obvious talent and serious artistic intent.
For me it is often the drawings that succeed, on both artistic and erotic
levels. For all their simplicity, they are challenging. The remnants of
Cypher`s many battles, personal and artistic, seem to haunt them. At the
same time they revel a bravura technique employed in search of vivid and
direct beauty. Elsewhere, in the paintings, I see glimpses of anxiety,
pan, humour and arousal, but I have difficulty sinking into these pictures.
I can admire them without liking them. A professional contact, lasting
some seventeen years now, with the issues and ideas involved might incline
me even less than most to hang them in my living room."
He
seemed to eat biographies of artists like Picasso or Balthus for breakfast,
and swung wildly between messianic faith in himself as an artist and a
crippling lack of self-confidence and, as he says himself, “nothing
in between”…. The show contains many explicit paintings of
ecstatic, theatricalised coitus; while others involve pornographic imagery
directly collaged onto the canvas. [Cypher] has also produced self-portraits
of self-mutilation and howling anguish, or blunt depictions of the packaging
of psychiatric drugs and anti-depressants. There’s lots of urgently
scrawled text concerning consciousness, memory, language, intractable
issues of charged male sexuality, and the druggy youth subculture he encountered
in his early 20s… Technically, it is extremely uneven but the best
work grips with its flailing spontaneity, its willful shattering of taboos
of penile sexuality… Around this time too, [Cypher] began writing
the Panic texts, enormous swathes of poetry, maxims, fantasies, rants
against radical feminists such as Dworkin, and indeed the “panic
biography”, which spans his earliest memories to his unfurling social
life, and is written with scorching honesty. It mercilessly documents
the Dublin nightlife of recreation drug-taking and unhappy sexual encounters.
The text, as it circulated in various drafts, led to rows between people
as it emerged that [Cypher] was writing virtually every conversation and
bitching session into art-history… Personally, I still find a lot
of it powerful, tragic and disturbing,"
“[Cypher’s]
work does not explicitly elaborate on the experimental artistic ideas
and styles of our times, but focus on emotional experiences – anxiety,
loneliness, frustrations and broken aspirations represent the bulk of
his production and, in fact I believe, are at the heart of his success…
[Cypher’s] ‘ artistic expression derives from the asymmetry
between aspiration and reality, conformity and diversity, identity and
difference, freedom and necessity. His pursuit of the absolute through
pleasure is an attempt to reconcile the irreconcilable and confront what
we usually refuse to acknowledge… [Cypher] says he does not mean
to be subversive, but merely tries to live his own individuality and as
such his work is a means to some kind of catharsis. Locked in his private
grief, depression and despair, [Cypher] brings us to the verge of madness.
His erotic pursuit can be seen as a reminder of the problematic status
of identity surrounding the crisis of representation that characterizes
our society. A world governed by hedonistic forms of consumption, where
the body has become a commodity and the subject is increasingly being
identified through the object (not its use-value but sign-value)."
"One
of [Cypher’s] main themes in his work is emasculation, which he
demonstrates in many of his self-portraits…. By posing himself in
positions of castration. He shows the place of man within a femminised
modern society, especially a man without confidence, wealth or social
standing…In 'Inferno', [Cypher’sr] expression is contorted
with rage and agony and he tears at his throat with clawing hands. The
background of the painting does a lot to portray its mood and, its theme
of mental anguish. The colours are loud and garish and look as though
they have been splashed or dabbed onto the canvas. Over the colourful
background, [Cypher] has painted his self-portrait in a much more careful
way, the effect of the realist portrait of the artist on the wild and
feverishly painted background with black paint splashed over the canvas,
is extremely striking. It is almost uncomfortable to view this painting
as the artist is laying himself bare, his body, his fears and his insecurities…The
trace technique which [Cypher] use for this creates an image which is
quite crude and comic strip like. This has its own impact as although
you are aware that the image has been taken directly from pornographic
reference material, it creates distance. You are able to judge the subject
matter and the message alone for a moment and forget the origins of the
image. In this way I find this technique quite successful, as it promotes
thought in the viewer without the initial reaction of disgust or discomfort
created by the more direct collages…I find these pieces [photo-collages
like 'No Host, 1993'] the most difficult to stomach, although I do appreciate
the ideas of self-exploration and self-expression which I feel they signify.
The direct quotation of the imagery disturbs me and gets in the way of
my appreciation of the work…'The Trauma of the Voyeur, (1993)…
Is a large oil painting which, although does not use the porno-collage
technique or trace technique, has obviously taken its inspiration from
pornographic source material. It is an example of [Cypher’s] painting
directly from pornographic sources, enlarging, and mixing up the images
from different sources…I find [Cypher’s] large paintings from
pornographic sources…interesting they do not disturb me to the extent
to which the porno-collage works do. So it is easier for me to appreciate
and understand what [Cypher] is trying to say with these pieces. At the
same time, [Cypher’s] work's which take direct reference from pornography…do
not for me convey as much feeling as his self-portraits…I can connect
with the emotions which [Cypher] is putting across and I find these works
much more satisfying."
"Application
techniques are variable and inconsistent but the effect is never dull.
Here you become strangely detached Peeping Tom in a small and joyless
claustrophobic world painted monstrously big. Group sexual athletics ad
nauseam are captured on large canvases in the grand manner of a master's
recording of an historic event…Cypher, survivor of a traumatic childhood,
is serious, intelligent and mature beyond his thirty years…Visitors
are confused as to the purpose of this exhibition. Five Day Wonder has
attracted folk with issues on their minds, not folk with ample funds…The
new painting by Cypher`s bed has been added to since yesterday evening.
An African mask like visage stares out at me from its painted nest of
thickly applied gray-white swirls, an image of alienation amid a sea of
turbulence. It seems as though the canvas has been attacked with a dagger
rather than a brush. Has Cypher finally put his feelings instead of his
mental images into paint for the first time ever, allowed the deadpan
control to finally slip? This is the first of his paintings I have seen
that has allowed the emergence of emotion. Those angry red paroxysms.
What is inside - outside… Even though Five Day Wonder has been little
more than a sounding-board for the walking wounded, a week long public
therapy session, the experiment appears to have had an astounding result
in the artist himself. The experience may well prove to be Cypher`s way
forward to the future, a liberating future for both himself and his art."