Jean-Michel Basquiat

Gagosian Gallery, Los Angeles
Ikon Gallery, Los Angeles
Private Collection, Los Angeles
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner

"Jean-Michel Basquiat has no color, he is all the colors that he has etched in his work"

Enrico Navarra in Exhibition Catalogue, Paris, Fondation Dina Vierny-Musée Maillol, Jean-Michel Basquiat: works on paper, 1997, p. 12

Action Hand Throws Laser Bombs both broadcasts the overwhelming diversity of Jean-Michel Basquiat's prodigious imagination and monumentalises his colourful autobiography. Consistent with his very best work this painting functions as a type of cryptic self-portrait, interrogating the remit of his existence by engaging his iconic and unique vernacular. Action Hand Throws Laser Bombs also confronts a more overtly global outlook in both its artistic questioning and in its wider portrayal of the human condition. This work illustrates the best of Basquiat's instinctive mark-making and invention, which characterises the highlights of his oeuvre. At the same time, the more controlled organisation of its iconography implicates Action Hand Throws Laser Bombs as a more cerebral painting. Diagrammatic and linear without compromising spontaneity or vivacity, this is the work of a man grown more analytical and discerning through the lessons of experience.

Painted on a huge scale in square format, this is a monolithic object that loudly echoes the New York walls that Basquiat had invested with so much when he adorned them with graffiti and poetry. The canvas ground is very clean and the various compositional elements stand out in high tonal and chromatic contrast. The extant shadow of Basquiat's stream of consciousness mark-making, the imagery here viscerally palpitates within an unstable, unfathomable white void. A family of silhouetted monochromatic figures - brown limbs sprouting leaves like anthropomorphic trees - float in the chaotic topography of a vacuum. The spattered iconography of attenuated bodies, capitalised text, and commercial branding sears the canvas and injects a blazing energy of syncopated symbolism across the picture plane. The opaque spectre of a spiked black shape - part-anvil, part black hole - hovers threateningly in its overshadowing prominence. Potentially either a destructive projectile or a devouring absence, this shape seems both to attract and repel the energy of the rest of the composition. The bodily gestures of the figures, conditioned by their outlines, appear drawn to it, while the rhythms of loose, flaying lines emanate away from it. 

On one level, the painting is organised around its characters, whose relationship engenders narrative. Their corporeal interplay relates a human story woven amid a scaffold of huge semiotic variety. For example, in the lower left a black arm outlined in blue appears to hold a briefcase surmounted by lightning bolts, while another yellow spike dissects a kind of birds nest further above. The viewer's eye is readily drawn to the easily-recognisable anthropomorphism of human trees, whose shapes fluctuate from the lyrical to the geometric. As instantly attractive is the archetypal branding of the 'IDEAL' logos, which are, after all, representative of an advertising exclusively designed to attract maximum attention. The heady concoction of textual, musical and quasi-religious imagery, transmuted via a graffiti vocabulary, implies a catalogue of equations necessitating signs and referents. However, as ever, Basquiat's painting is not some secret code: among its footprints, arrows and tails resides ongoing and urgent dynamism.

The two motifs of the 'IDEAL' logo are closely related to Andy Warhol's Pop dialectic, and represent a major theme that repeatedly reappeared in other Basquiat paintings, such as She Installs Confidence and Picks his Brain Like a Salad (1987, Private Collection, Paris). These trademarks show Basquiat's keen interest in the powers of marketing and evince the colossal influence that Warhol was to make on him during their intense friendship. It also shows that the younger artist was developing his fierce spontaneity into a more layered and complex idiom, introducing themes like the assessment of contemporary consumerism. Basquiat had been formally introduced to Warhol in October 1982 through Bruno Bischofberger, the dealer who represented them both. Their personal relationship mined a rich seam of similarity and dissonance, as Keith Haring described, "The mystery that was Warhol was challenged by the complexities that were Basquiat. Their projected 'images' were powerful and uncompromising, while they both harboured a vulnerable, humble spirit which endowed both of them with a sense of humour. They 'understood' each other" (Keith Haring in Exhibition Catalogue, London, The Mayor Rowan Gallery, Collaborations. Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat, 1988, n.p.). Later, after Warhol died in February 1987, Basquiat's work became increasingly preoccupied with death. Some have even gone so far as to suggest that "The death of Andy Warhol made the death of Basquiat inevitable, somehow Warhol was the one person who he would approach...After Andy was gone there was no one who Jean-Michel was in such awe of that he would respond to" (Donald Rubell cited in Tony Shafrazi, Ed., Jean-Michel Basquiat, New York 1999, p. 332).

In Action Hand Throws Laser Bombs the horizontal figure at the left centre is lying down between short, green, grass-like dashes, and capped by a yellow aureole. Perhaps this headpiece is something of a halo, and the character, circumscribed by a thick oval of dark scarlet, is in fact dead: a fallen member of the tribe and above the character is the inscription 'LEVETATE A'. Ultimately, the seminal power of Basquiat's communication evades direct interpretation and from the red footprint to the poetically arresting and urgent 'ACTION HAND THROWS LASER BOMBS', this painting encapsulates Basquiat's myriad, visionary and incredibly appealing language.