MALLADIO @ Slug and Lettuce
PETER: Malladio? How did you come about the name?
MALLADIO: It's a Yorkshire and Lancashire thing people saying "Now then Ma lad" and there's also a renaissance architect called Palladio who designed a very ornate way of decorating very boring, functional villas in the 1500's in Tuscany,Italy.
And it was a case of blending the Yorkshire colloquialism for "now then my son", now then my lad" with Palladio and you get Malladio which I always say is a Yorkshire lad aspiring to classical heights... and if you believe that you believe anything (laughs).
PETER: All your work seems to have a story behind them.
MALLADIO: Yes The Loony Party one has a particularly broad story to it (FIG2)Eddie V stood for the Loonies I painted myself in the painting because I stood independantly with Loony tendencies, forming a party called the York Integrity Party... YIP, Yippy aye hey etc. etc.
I met Lord Sutch he hit me on the back of the head with an inflatable club about 20 years ago, but when he was a kid Winston Churchill was down in the east end looking at the bomb sites after the war and met him, Churchill asked him his name, he told him David Sutch, and Churchill said "Such is and such will be" and stubbed his cigar on the back of Sutch's hand. So it's like passing on this baton with pain, he then went into politics and ex amount of years later when Sutch was a man and I was a student, he battered me on the head with an inflatable club, he knocked me senseless. We later met up at a gig and he gave me loads of stickers, I nearly got thrown out of college because I was sticking them all over, took me years to get rid of them.
PETER: Do you get many commissions because your style of work, borders on the caricature, but they are also steeped in the Surrealist tradition.
MALLADIO: This is a classical example of people coming to ask me what to do, (FIG 3). This guy owns a few businesses in York, he also runs a guest house and he's aiming it at getting people from the States over to stay via his website. He's got loads of prints of James Dean, Cagney playing pool with Marilyn Munroe, classic re-paint jobs with ex amount of celebrities in a cadillac. So I did a spin on that, I've actually done one where him and John Wayne are serving tea to Laural and Hardy. But this one is outside of the guest house with the Chevrelay and stars such as Liz Taylor, Elvis, Marlon Brando, but the lions are in it because when he said to me, when he came across my work "I'd like to have a painting done, I have this guest house up so and so street, would you like to come up, you'll probably know the guest house" Then I said "Before you go any further I am always going by there, there's this guest house with these two bloody awful lions outside" And he went, dropping his smile "Yeah that's mine... how much are you going to do it for?" I said " Fifty quid less than I would normally charge for the insult on the Lions".
But obviously in my work I can bring the Lions to life and there's an Odeon cinema in the middle set behind his property, it's basically bringing in key elements of what he likes.
PETER: Yeah it is a bit like a dream, mixing things up.
MALLADIO: Even though they are figurative and they should be quite straight forward to a degree but there's always an element of layers where things come out personally for people the more you look into them the more you get out of them.
PETER: Can you tell me more about ROTA (Return Of The Artist) and the York Art scene?
MALLADIO: A bar environment like of VJ'S is ideal for me, I think a bar is actually more publicly accessible in todays culture than an average gallery, it's open at least 5 - 6 hours longer. People don't feel as inhibited to go up to the work so there's more direct access to the work. Up to a few years ago in various cities York especially didn't have much exhibition venues but they had acres and acres of very nice clean wall space in restruarants, cafes, bars, hotels and as an Artist I was already using that as an exhibition space, encouraged a few more people to come along and the group grew very quickly from 5 people to 10 people in a month and then from 10 to 50 and in 5 years we showed the work in York, saliently in York of 75 Artist's of which now there are a 100 Artist's in the York region who have all had some connection, whether exhibiting, workshops or literally just getting some frames made through ROTA which is a voluntary group, through networking and information Artist's can work out which restraurants and bars could take their work, avoiding embarrassing situations where the work just isn't relevant. So the group has grown and there's a very large network of Artist's under the banner Return Of The Artist or ROTA which obviously refers to the Artist going around constantly changing wall spaces etc.