Outrage Over Local Exhibition

Florian Van Jannel. Not necessarily a household name, you might think. But that could soon change. For I can reveal that Master Jannel - a conceptual contemporary artist from Old Lynn Town – is already making his mark in the national art world this year. His forthcoming exhibition of nonsensical self-portrature and scandalous, neon-lit cartoon debaucheries is causing a very putrid stink among the country’s moral guardians. “Ban this Sick Stunt” exhaled the tired lungs of a certain right-wing tabloid this week. “I simply don’t get it” said Germaine Greer last Tuesday evening. “I will sue the little runt to kingdom come”, said Will Disney in January. Aaaaaaand so on.

Florian himself is more than slightly amused by this “press storm of locusts”, as he delicately puts it when I finally catch up with him in Old Lynn’s Artist Centre Alcohol Zone. “Some say I am a bleak genius, some say my work is merely passable. Either way? Ker-ching.” He laughs into his pint of nut-brown ale. “What I’m trying to do is shake up the moral media a bit – show them who’s boss in Cracktown. And it ain’t them, ok?”

Florian Self Portrait: 'Distort'.

Florian wowed the local arterati last year with his enigmatic sculptures of dead rodents and other roadkill ceramics, but some dissenters believe his genius has a best-before date stamped on it, and that the quality of his work is already beginning to rot. Local TV network programme Pre-Tension recently condemned his work as “mind-numbingly shallow and low level”, many of his images featuring nothing more than abject, mindless “decay fetish”. Van Jannel, however, takes such biting criticism in his stride, mentioning to whomever will listen that such disapproving critics have completely misunderstood his intentions; “I am not saying that my work is a consciously definitive damning portrait of modern society as I see it, it just happens to be a definitive damning portrait of modern society as I see it.”

“My ideas come mainly from my dreams. They’re often vulgar…sometimes kinky…always entertaining. I once dreamt I was eating a giant marshmallow… I won’t tell you how that particular anecdote ends. Suffice to say I was feverishly painting on canvas as soon as I left A&E that morning.”

His unique exhibition of backlit neon cartoon disfigurements and plainly odd photographs entitled “What God Wants I Have Already, And I’m Not Playing Ball” is to be held from February 25th to April 06th in the Old Lynn Artist Centre. Children not encouraged.

Polly Blank
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February 2012

[chat to Florian live, as soon as you read this, via accessing the chatroom node of the official Quicklime News website. He’ll be there waiting. Trust me... He’s definitely there… Go on then… Logon Rock Witch!]