Mrs Tsk *

“Even the catalogue was fun to read,” says Kimberly Bradley in her Artnet review of the recent ABC Art Fair in Berlin, “featuring both curator essays and lighter pieces by writers like Nick Currie (aka Momus)”.

My piece, commissioned by Milan publishing house Mousse, was a Nat Tate-style hoax which took as its subject an imaginary Scottish-Italian painter modelled partly on my Mallorca-based Scottish Italian friend Martin Rossi and partly on the half-Japanese, half-British painter Peter McDonald. Martin — who is actually a painter — represented Scotty in the photos. The piece follows below. You can buy the catalogue here. There’s also a piece of mine — A New Fruit — in the next edition of Mousse magazine.

POING: The ecstatic paintings of Scotty Potenza

Despite the constant reminder embedded in his first name, Scotty Potenza is one of those artists it’s almost impossible to think of as Scottish. In fact, like Alicia Keys, Richard Demarco and Alberto Morrocco, Potenza is a Scot of Italian origin. His parents — economic migrants fleeing Sicily — arrived in Glasgow in the early 1970s, and by the time Scotty was born in 1973 his father was a successful entrepreneur operating an inexplicably popular chain of ice cream parlours across Scotland’s freezing, drizzly central lowlands. 

The colour, shape and texture of fresh ice cream is certainly visible in Potenza’s acrylic gouaches; peach, pistachio and purply-red forest berries distinguish themselves forcefully from the sodden greens and asphalt greys of the Scottish industrial landscape. His subject-matter shares this otherness: influenced by the exciting first wave of Acid House culture in the late 1980s, Potenza evinces a non-Calvinist positivity more evocative of Chicago warehouses and Ibiza raves than Glasgow tenements. A Potenza painting incarnates not what Scotland is, but what it lacks.

The paintings are already widely familiar thanks to one-man shows in prestigious institutions. Whether at the New Museum in New York, the Maxxi in Rome, or Kanazawa’s 21st Century Art Museum, Potenza’s canvases and murals populate institutional white cube walls with big-headed, smiley beings — schematic and alien yet happy and friendly — which float like lumpy Space Invaders in a radically rudimentary landscape of primary colours. It’s impossible to look at these “bubbleheads” without experiencing a lift in mood. They are particularly popular with children and young Japanese women, and have been widely licensed for merchandising.


Rather than visitors from outer space, these happy spooks seem to be spectres from an inner space made radiant, luminous and childish by MDMA, the Happy Hardcore movement’s mood-altering chemical of choice. Potenza claims he hasn’t taken ecstasy, but it’s irrelevant: the young painter seems to have been steeped at baptism in a vat of the stuff, rather as the young Obelix was steeped in magic potion. Ecstasy, with its irrational exuberance, informs the mood and the mythos that underpins all his work. Potenzaworld — like Kostabiworld before it — is a loopy, ecstatic place.

If his bi-cultural heritage hammered a block wedge between the young Potenza and the dreary Scotland in which he grew up, serious generational gaps soon also opened up between Scotty and his tutors. Sandy Moffat, his assigned teacher at Glasgow School of Art, had had no trouble connecting his star pupil of the 1980s — the late, great Steven Campbell — with Otto Dix or Vincent Van Gogh. But the arrival of a young painter who cited 180BPM ravers Hixxy and Mental Theo as antecedents was too alien, and the genial Moffat washed his hands of Potenza, declaring him “unteachable”. It was as if Marcel Duchamp had appeared fully-formed in a 19th century art school still centred on life drawings of the Winged Victory of Samothrace.

“When the housewife is lazy, the cat is industrious,” says the old proverb. And so it was that rave clubs on Ibiza took the place, in Potenza’s biography, of painting professors, and the energy of electronic dance music took over from the flagging thrust of a Neo-Expressionist revival which, by 1990, had clogged into self-parody and mannerism. The wild brush-strokes of Chia and Baselitz — not to mention a thousand imitators —  were beginning, by this time, to pall into a trompe l’oeil approximation of Weimar Berlin presided over by Bush the Elder.  The New World Order would be based on something much more primal and idiotic.

If the light and colour of Tunisia were the “final revelations” which made the young Paul Klee into a truly modern painter, it was the 1992 gabber single Poing by Rotterdam Termination Source which broke Scotty Potenza through to his comfortably postmodernist, defiantly happy signature style. Anyone who has heard the record will remember forever its insistent, buddhistically-empty refrain, the gigantic and remorseless sound of a broken spring being tweaked by a sadistic god in a cosmic void, over and over again: poing poing poing poing poing poing poing poing poing poing poing poing poing poing poing poing poing poing poing poing…



Although art figures — lead by a stinging and sarcastic Sandy Nairne, who branded the work “glitz for morons” — proved initially suspicious, the music world was quick to recognise and repay the compliments Potenza was heaping upon it. Lady Gaga is said to own a dozen Potenza canvases, a fact which, when she learned it, made Björk reluctantly abandon her plan to feature a Potenza image on the cover of her 2011 album Biophilia. In a similar move, teenage socialite Charles Guislain is said to have asked his trustees to dispose of their Potenza holdings when it emerged that Justin Bieber had acquired several paintings by the artist.

With the economic security which accompanies spreading fame and solid sales, Potenza has been able to delegate some of his more tedious grunt work to assistants. And so the overlapping colour filtration effects which form a constant motif in his compositions — they require exact calculation and intimate knowledge of the ways in which paint can be made to emulate the fleeting effects of computerised club lighting — are now handled by a retired DJ called Norman Begg, and the software-assisted construction of new bezier curves is dealt with by Amanda Zwirner, a talented paper-cutter known for her innovations in fractal snowflake design.



As 1990s rave culture has continued to experience the bearhug embrace of mainstream acceptance in the UK — its visual values, once restricted to club flyers, now inform restaurant design, public information films and TV commercials for banks and building societies — Potenza has been granted a high-profile list of public commissions. His decoration of the walls of the Home Office lobby with a mural of happy ravers, their hands linked like the figures in Matisse’s La Danse, caused short-lived (and clearly manufactured) outrage in the tabloids, but has proved peculiarly popular with the civil servants who work in the building. A major mural at Finsbury Park underground station entitled Get On One Matey! was unfortunately damaged beyond repair in the 2011 riots. The vandals, caught on CCTV, are currently serving long prison sentences.

As Potenza advances into mid-career it’s becoming increasingly unclear whether his paintings represent mere nostalgia for the culture of his youth (a generational madeleine which goes a long way towards giving his work its mass-cultural potency) or whether it should take its place in the more detached and anthropological mode that falls under the rubric of “the archeology of the recent past”. Installation and video artists like Matt Stokes and Mark Leckey have also poked trowels into the foundations of a rave culture they’re too young to remember themselves; Leckey’s video Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore could be shown alongside a Potenza canvas to give suitable historical context, and Potenza, Leckey and Stokes could all take their place in one of Jeremy Deller’s faux-museums of contemporary folk art.


In his late thirties Potenza, who now lives with his partner Maddy in Mallorca, is slowing, showing an understandable detachment from the nosebleed hedonism of Happy Hardcore. He hasn’t set foot on Ibiza once since buying Robert Graves’ old house on Mallorca, nor has he visited the brash club resort of Magaluf. It’s said he doesn’t even have internet access at home, preferring to spend long hours in his tiled study poring over his pet project; a laborious captionless graphic novel of Gibbon’s Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire executed in the style of Japanese conceptual manga artist Yuichi Yokoyama. Publication is expected sometime in the mid-2020s.

There are signs that Potenza is increasingly embracing his Italian heritage; his latest paintings, executed in a style he has described as “Cute Formalism”, show bubbleheads leaning over easels propping canvases in the Spatialist style of Italo-Argentine painter Lucio Fontana. The razor-wielding blob-men slash through to the space behind the canvases, as if attempting to confirm a suspicion that behind the surface of specular reality lies a universal nothingness. In the background we seem to hear the gigantic and remorseless sound of a broken spring being tweaked by a sadistic god in a cosmic void, over and over again: poing poing poing poing poing poing poing poing poing poing poing poing poing poing poing poing poing poing poing poing…