you’ve done this on purpose is a solo exhibition by British artist daft-apeth as part of Bang & Olufsen's 'Art Lates' series, a West Contemporary collaborative collection of intimate art shows at the New Bond Street flagship store of the audio/visual tech innovators. 

About daft-apeth

Drawing from the imagery and visual language permeating modern living, though illuminated with irreverent flashes of personal memory and wry humour, daft-apeth’s conceptual resettling of familiar and reassuring staples in unique, ‘bigger-than-every-day-life’ situations both commemorates and questions the reassuring yet ultimately manipulative visual narrative coiling around us.

Informed by the growth of branding symbolism that flowered during the artist’s childhood in the 1980s, but flavoured and subverted by the idiosyncrasies, idioms and experience of working-class life in the East Midlands, daft-apeth harnesses and reassembles household and high-street perennials to form a new iconography.

The visual expression of songwriter, producer and musician Sergio Pizzorno, the creative force at the heart of Kasabian and The S.L.P, since daft-apeth’s debut show in 2018, he has consistently provoked and beguiled with a vision that reaches from the crumbs down the back of the sofa to pristine, globally-recognisable logos, repurposing and reframing cultural elements that colour millions of lives on a daily basis.

Guests within our shop will witness a particular exemplar of this outlook in a work debuting in his new show, you’ve done this on purpose, which finds Pizzorno sending the once, near-ubiquitous three wall-mounted flying Mallard Ducks – first moulded in his native Midlands – on a new flight path. Feathered with the same latex coating employed by scratch cards, the ducks’ traditional kitsch colour scheme can be forcefully eroded to reveal a number of alternative coloured layers – should one be feeling lucky.

As this work typifies, not only is Pizzorno comfortable manipulating a wide selection of media, utilising metals, canvas, sculpture, acrylics and objet trouvé, alongside printmaking, but there is also a playful touch and a keen comic eye behind daft-apeth’s worldview, as half-remembered conversations, overheard local slang, names of niche music genres, and more, pepper some of his mixed-media pieces with a post-it-note-like sloganeering that proves equally evocative and assertive.

This impulsive discourse reflects the unique position Pizzorno’s visual practice occupies within his wider creative spectrum, allowing him to bring ideas and concepts into reality at a greater speed than music can sometimes allow, due to the mitigation of recording and releasing that his material demands.

While this unconfined, personal approach has allowed Pizzorno to explore an expanded range of expression – the appropriation of found phrases contrasting sharply with his meticulousness as a celebrated lyricist, for example – you’ve done this on purpose has provided an opportunity for the artist to join the creative dots as he revisits 2018 artwork Pump Jam Session Tops to provide the inspiration for the one-off daft-apeth customisation of a Bang & Olufsen speaker stack. With our iconic quality equipment adorned by equally iconic, oversized milk bottle tops, Pizzorno’s study of the fault lines between organic culture and proscribed consumerism offers artistic nourishment that is not just ‘pasteurised’ but ‘fully idolised’.