Duncan McAfee is artist currently working primarily in painting and drawing. Born 1976, Hertford, UK, he now lives and works in South East London.
The Exploding Heads (2019) are a series of forty 30x40cm paintings. Responding to the initial chance action of spilled ink and paint that that looks like red wine, the surfaces are built up in layers like a game of consequences forming heads apparently collaged together from misremembered clumps of art history and dollops of pop-culture. This is reflected in their comic titles of misquoted names or phrases. Contradictions of fast-slow, heavy-light, funny-grotesque are captured at some point between collapse and alignment, caught in an awkward moment of transition. The paintings are uncomfortable and strange but celebratory and comic; what he sometimes refers to as ‘schitzo-paintings’.
Having abandoned painting at Chelsea in the late 90s McAfee has returned to it in his 40s with a mischievous sense of fun and games. He borrows from art history and contemporary cartoon imagery. There is joy in combining pure flat colour, graphic and figurative elements with messy paintwork. The emerging characters are street-drunks, beaten up cartoon characters spattered in Claret. They wrestle with themselves, contorted and dis-jointed, uncomfortably torn between figuration and abstraction, mascots of our confused cartoon world or Riddley Walker-esque prophets of what may come next.
