In 2010, I visited Fergus Binns quite regularly for lunch at Friends of the Earth. We’d nibble on our organic lunch plate and then head upstairs to his Smith Street studio to have a look at what he was up to. The painting taking shape for the bulk of that year was Toy painting (Alice in Neverland), a huge exploration in oil paint that calls on pop imagery and art history to unpack HIStory. I walked away from my first encounter quite flabbergasted at the sheer ambition of the work. Two years later and it’s still on my mind. The painting roams across an expanse of psychology and painting territory, crossing the gruesome power of paintings such as Goya’s Saturn devouring one of his sons with a sea of fairy-tale symbols surrounding the King of Pop’s harassment within the psychedelic Neverlandscape. Like Jackson himself, the painting is best left with this short introduction or a very long analysis.
Fergus Binns is a studio artist at Gertrude Contemporary and has a show opening at Utopian Slumps on 19 October this year.
