In his latest exhibition John Squire has moved away from the Pollock-esque abstraction he is famed for and has turned his brush to the geometric forms ubiquitous in religious Islamic painting. In many ways, Celebrity is something of a conceptual masterstroke from the man who once penned a track entitled "Dumb Celebrity Incinerator", employing the anti-idolatrous creed of the Islamic faith to challenge the ever-more powerful spectre of celebrity culture. Here, unique, fragmentary depictions of patterns that you might expect to see in a mosque are personified with titles that include everyone from the likes of Cheryl Cole to Harold Shipman, making a bold statement about our willingness in the west to elevate any individual, and the darkness that can inform that practice. At the heart of the show is the deconstruction of what Squire describes as our "new gods" and the appropriation of these individuals into the mass or collective as it is conceived in the Islamic Faith, making us consider why it is that we have become so familiar with the deification of the individual. AnOther caught up with the artist and ex-Stone Rose at the Idea Generation gallery to find out why serial killers will always become celebrities in the kind of society that turns the likes of Peter Andre into a God.
John Squire: Celebrity runs until 3 July at the Idea Generation Gallery, 11 Chance Street, London E2 7JB.
Text by John-Paul Pryor
Photography by Craig Thomas
