Artists

Goalie Goes Up: The Art of Leaping Toward the Impossible

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Somewhere between the sacred geometry of Kazimir Malevich and the muddy poetry of Sunday league football lies the artist known only as Goalie Goes Up,a name that evokes panic in both the penalty box and the gallery, with its reckless pursuit of glory. This is not merely an alias, but a manifesto. A gesture. An abstraction in motion.

To encounter Goalie Goes Up’s work is to be suspended in a moment of potential energy,“like a goalkeeper,” as one critic has noted, “leaving the safety of the line to chase a corner he will never reach.”* England fans know this sensation well: a bold dash, a nation breathless, and then the crushing inevitability of failure. A loop repeated every four years since 1966, with the unyielding optimism of Lear’s fool: “Thou shouldst not have been old till thou hadst been wise.”

The work itself? Think digital paint not flung but placed, rather like limbs in a last-minute set piece. Shapes avoid collision. Lines buckle. Every canvas is a pitch, every mark a movement, yet not necessarily a goal. There’s a tension between aggression and grace, between the measured formation and the wild lunge. You do not look at a Goalie Goes Up work so much as hear it,boots scraping, lungs bursting, the sound of eighty thousand hopes deflating all at once. It’s as if Caravaggio had spent a rainy childhood watching Tranmere Rovers.

Yet, beneath this appearance of chaos lies thought,philosophy, even. In the artist’s rare interviews (delivered in cryptic riddles on annotated team sheets), she suggests that her abstractions are gestures of belief in the face of impossible odds. “I leap,” she once wrote on the back of a canvas, “not to catch the ball, but to remain human.”

This is art not for the trophy case, but for the long journey home. As Voltaire put it, “One must imagine Sisyphus happy”,or perhaps, one must imagine Sisyphus leaving safety behind and jumping for a late equaliser in extra time.

The cultural critics, understandably confused, have compared Goalie Goes Up to everyone from Cy Twombly to David Seaman. But such comparisons miss the point. This is not an artist who plays with stylistic coherence. Each piece is a stoppage-time decision. A scramble. A tangle of limbs and lines in search of transcendence. Some fail utterly. Some hit the post. But occasionally, gloriously, the art connects,cleanly, sweetly,with a viewer, and the crowd roars.

England’s record in World Cups (one win, eternal heartbreak) finds strange resonance in this practice. The bold lunge of Goalie Goes Up is a national allegory: hopeful, doomed, noble in its futility. It is Beckham’s red card, Southgate’s missed penalty, Pickford’s fingertips. It is art that remembers every near miss and celebrates them as if they were victories.

What a play Shakespeare would have written, had he focused his skills on football. We can only guess what he would have said, but we know that he knew a thing or two about tragic ambition. Maybe he would have described this art with words he gave to Henry V: “Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more.” The goalie goes up,not because he should, but because he must.

And in that absurd, beautiful leap, leaving his own goal asunder, art lives.

*Kingsley Break, Art Listner, July 2024

Interview with Hackson Jollock: Lines, Fury, and the Endless Loop of #64

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Hackson Jollock is one of Britain’s most ferociously original visual artists,if not always the most serene. His canvases are an explosion of line and motion, electric with frustration, precision, and improvisation. His latest work, titled simply #64, is a tangle of looping, frenetic lines in indigo, copper, and blood red. It’s been hailed as both a “nervous system laid bare” and “a topographical map of thought.” But one thing is certain: whatever you do, don’t mention Jackson Pollock around him.

Interviewer: Hackson, thank you for joining us. Let’s begin with the elephant in the room,your name and the inevitable comparison to a certain American painter.

Hackson Jollock:

Look, I didn’t choose to be born with a name that sounds like a pun. That’s my parents’ fault, not mine. But I’ll say it once and for all: I am not mimicking Jackson Pollock. I do not drip. I slash. I etch. I rage. Pollock was obsessed with surrendering to the unconscious. I’m busy interrogating it. If you want to talk about influence, let’s talk about Kandinsky, Cy Twombly, or the London Tube map. But enough about Pollock. Let him rest.

Interviewer: Understood. Let’s talk about your latest piece, #64. It’s a field of restless lines,some looping, some slicing,and signed in bright red in the corner. What’s going on here?

Jollock:

It’s a language, or the breakdown of one. I think of my work as a kind of graphic stammer. Every line is a stutter, a contradiction, a backtrack. #64 is part of an ongoing series exploring failure,failure of communication, failure of memory, failure of form. I wanted to see what happens when you just keep drawing until the meaning collapses.

Interviewer: There’s an almost musical quality to the piece, like jazz improvisation. Is that deliberate?

Jollock:

Absolutely. I sometimes listen to free jazz when I work. Ornette Coleman, Sun Ra, early Soft Machine. I’m not painting to the music,I’m painting inside it. The lines are phrasing. They’re riffs. Sometimes I leave spaces like rests in a measure. #64 is noisy, but there’s rhythm in the chaos. That’s where the tension lives.

Interviewer: You’ve said before that you don’t “plan” your works. But surely a piece like this has structure?

Jollock:

There’s structure in the aftermath. When I begin, I don’t have an image in mind,I have energy. Anger, mostly with this one. I start with a single color and move as fast as I can. Then another color. Then another. I don’t stand back until it’s nearly over. Only then do I see the shape of what I’ve made. It’s like fighting your way through fog and realizing you’ve built a cathedral out of your footsteps.

Interviewer: Many of your paintings feature the number titles,#37, #48, and now #64. Is that a rejection of narrative?

Jollock:

Yes. And no. The numbers are part of the narrative. They’re coordinates in my brain’s geography. I don’t want to tell you what to see. I want you to look and feel. If I called it “Tension Between Lovers in a Mid-Sized Town”, you’d bring your own tired baggage. #64 could be anything. It could be you.

Interviewer: Do you ever think your work is hard for people to access?

Jollock:

Good. I don’t want to be accessible. I want to be intrusive. Art should interrupt your day, not decorate your flat. If someone looks at #64 and feels overwhelmed, irritated, confused,that’s a success. That means I’ve reached them before they’ve reached for an explanation.

Interviewer: Finally, what’s next for Hackson Jollock?

Jollock:

I’m building a machine that draws without stopping. A mechanical extension of my process. It will never sleep. It might draw forever, or it might jam up in five minutes and implode. I think that’s perfect.

#64 is currently on view at the Pimlico Wilde Gallery, London. Viewers are encouraged to bring their own interpretations.

Our artists – Doodle Pip: The Unlikely Portraitist of Scribbled Souls

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Our artists – Doodle Pip: The Unlikely Portraitist of Scribbled Souls

In the pantheon of contemporary visual artists, where hyperrealism jostles with conceptual minimalism, Doodle Pip occupies a space all his own,an enclave of joyful contradiction. Known for his chaotic, scribbled portraits that seem to defy both likeness and logic, Pip has carved out a niche that is equal parts irreverent and oddly philosophical. His art, he insists, must never resemble the sitter. Should it bear a resemblance, he discards the drawing with the same theatrical zeal that a stage magician might burn a failed trick. For Doodle Pip, resemblance is not only beside the point; it is the antithesis of his practice.

The artist,whose real name remains as elusive as a straight line in his work,has earned a cult following for his high-velocity drawings, executed with a sense of feverish glee. Armed with what is surely a hyperactive imagination, Pip creates portraits that are more topographical than representational. Eyebrows float mid-air like stray commas. Noses erupt at improbable angles. Limbs tangle, contort, or vanish entirely. A single scribble may contain several iterations of the same face, none of which seem particularly committed to the anatomy of their subject. It’s a kind of anti-caricature,liberated from both accuracy and flattery.

Yet for all their chaos, Doodle Pip’s drawings are unmistakably deliberate. “I’m not trying to capture how someone looks,” he once said in a rare interview, “but how it feels when they’re in the room.” This ethos places him in a curious lineage of artists,those who have consciously disavowed mimesis in favor of mood. Think Egon Schiele with a sense of humor, or Jean Dubuffet after three espressos and a Monty Python binge.

There is, at the heart of Pip’s practice, a philosophical subtext. His refusal to render likeness calls into question the very function of portraiture. In a world awash with selfies, biometrics, and algorithmic surveillance, Pip’s scribbles feel like acts of playful rebellion. They deny the tyranny of appearance, embracing instead a flux of impressions, sensations, and psychological noise. A Pip portrait is not a mirror; it is a maze.

Those who have sat for him,a motley assortment of musicians, writers, buskers, and baristas,often speak of the experience in quasi-spiritual terms. “It was like watching myself dissolve,” said one subject, “and then come back as a cartoon ghost drawn by someone with hiccups.” Despite their lack of fidelity, Pip’s drawings somehow manage to resonate, provoking laughter, confusion, and often a strange pang of recognition. Not recognition of the face, but of the essence behind it.

Critics have struggled to place him. Some label his work as “outsider art,” a term Pip roundly dismisses with a scribbled sigh. Others point to the Dadaists, or the automatic drawings of the Surrealists. But these comparisons only go so far. Pip’s wit is sharper, his rules more absurd. “If I see a nose where it’s meant to be,” he once quipped, “I start to panic.”

Beyond the novelty, there is a method,a structure in the scribble. His compositions, while anarchic, exhibit a balance of texture and space that belies their apparent randomness. And his lines,loopy, jagged, sometimes frantic,pulse with kinetic energy, suggesting movement not just of the hand but of thought.

Ultimately, Doodle Pip invites us to rethink what it means to be “seen.” In defying likeness, he reveals something truer, or at least freer: the energy of a person rather than their image, the echo rather than the sound. In a time obsessed with digital precision, his work feels human, ungovernable, and refreshing.

For Pip, the greatest sin is to make a drawing that could be mistaken for its subject. In this deliberate failure, he finds a curious success,one line at a time.

What do we Look For when choosing an Artist for Pimlico Wilde?

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What does silence smell like when translated into movement?

At Pimlico Wilde, we don’t represent artists in the conventional sense. We cultivate enigmas. We seek out the unruly minds, the inconvenient geniuses, and the creative athletes who do not fit inside the polite folds of contemporary art institutions. Ours is not a gallery for the merely talented , we curate the improbable, the unsettling, the impossible-to-ignore.

Who We Represent

Our artists are visionaries who are not content to just make art , they must become it. Their work is not simply exhibited; it is absorbed, argued with, sometimes even feared. A Pimlico Wilde artist makes work that interrogates, undermines, transcends.

We have recently turned down-

• A Neo–mystic group who paint while blindfolded and fast for three days every four days.

• Algorithmic dissidents who rewrite obsolete software in forgotten languages to generate chaotic visual structures.

• Conceptual botanists who grow living installations from seeds planted in books banned in at least three countries.

• Sonic archaeologists who seek out information about extinct birds, then reconstruct their songs and attempt to get the London Philharmonic to play them at the end of their concerts.

We have just accepted –

An artist who only exhibits work in other people’s dreams. (If you don’t dream about it, you aren’t invited to the private view).

Our Typical Application Requirements

We receive countless unsolicited portfolios. Almost all are discarded, not out of arrogance, but because our application process has not been adhered to. It weeds out anyone not fully committed. Here are our current, non-negotiable requirements for any artists wishing to join the Pimlico Wilde stable.

1. You must have been banned from exhibiting in at least one public venue , we have no desire to know why.

2. Your artist statement must be sent to us written in a fictional language of your own invention, complete with a pronunciation guide and grammatical overview.

3. You must submit 500 words explaining why you believe you should not be represented by us. The more convincing, the better.

4. You may not include a CV. We do not care where you studied, who reviewed you, or how many followers you have. If even a short biography is included, you will not be read at all.

8. A final requirement, and the most important: you must answer this question in either twelve, ninety-one or two thousand and three words:

What does silence smell like when translated into movement?

Why?

Pimlico Wilde was never intended to be just a commercial gallery. Our collectors are rare and discerning. They don’t purchase art for investment; they want work that alters them, not flatters them.

If you’re an artist seeking safety, stability, or understanding , this isn’t the place. But if you’ve ever felt like you were making art with a fever and no audience, no map, and no market , perhaps you already belong.

We’re not easy to find. But then, neither are you.

If you are interested in finding out more, please contact us via whatever you deduce to be the correct email address. If you haven’t heard from us for over a year, and you are certain you fulfilled all the requirements, then you probably didn’t have the right email address.

NB: We reserve the right to change, limit, remove or ignore any requirements, at any moment, for any length of time.

Regent’s Street digital painting by Hedge Fund

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Hedge Fund’s digital painting of Regent Street emerges as a bold reconfiguration of urban iconography, blending sharp contours with chromatic discord to confront the viewer with a distilled essence of modernity. The work echoes the socio-aesthetic critiques of the Pop Art movement, particularly in its Warholian flattening of depth and its unapologetic use of color as a declarative rather than descriptive device.

Foregrounded by the figure of a woman mid-gesture, the composition speaks to the alienation and fleeting connections emblematic of metropolitan life. Hedge Fund’s treatment of her form,outlined in stark, almost aggressive black,is a nod to the Neo-Expressionist embrace of emotional immediacy. The surrounding figures, rendered with less intensity, function as passive actors in this theatrical tableau of the mundane. The choice to situate these figures against the commercial backdrop of Regent Street,a site saturated with the histories of consumerism and architectural grandeur,imbues the work with an underlying tension.

In many ways, the artist evokes Walter Benjamin’s musings in The Arcades Project: “Cities are the realized dreams of modernity, but also its battlegrounds.” Hedge Fund captures this duality through a collision of geometric precision and an irreverent disregard for photorealistic fidelity. The palette,subdued yet punctuated by the acidic yellow of the woman’s hair,heightens the sense of dissonance, evoking a subdued palette similar to Edward Ruscha’s explorations of Americana, though transposed into a European context.

What sets this digital painting apart is its simultaneous embrace and critique of the digital medium. The hyper-saturation and precision feel deeply rooted in the algorithmic logic of digital creation, while the human subjects retain a rawness and individuality that resists technological homogenization. Hedge Fund‘s work thus becomes a dialogic site where the past and future of art wrestle for dominance.

Ultimately, Hedge Fund‘s Regent Street is a resonant meditation on temporality and space. It does not invite the viewer to linger in beauty but rather compels them to interrogate their role as both participant and observer in the constructed spectacle of urban life. As the late John Berger might have remarked, “The way we see things is affected by what we know.” Here, Hedge Fund challenges us to confront not only what we know of Regent Street but also what we might prefer to ignore.