British artist Peter De Francia interviewed

This video from Britain says about itself:

remix project on Paula Rego‘s “The Proles’ Wall” and Peter de Francia’s “The Bombing of Sakiet”

From London daily The Morning Star:

Interview

(Monday 27 November 2006)

ART WITH A PURPOSE: Socialist art by Peter De Francia.

PETER DE FRANCIA talks about his views as a socialist artist who operates outside fashionable and commercial art circles to CHRISTINE LINDEY.

PETER DE FRANCIA is an unusual and underrated artist.

Unafraid of going against the grain of fashionable aesthetics, he is one of the few artists in Britain to have consistently produced works that are rooted in a humane, socialist world view since the 1950s.

Unusually for a 20th century artist, he has questioned the emphasis on originality and the cult of individualism in contemporary art.

He points out to the Star that these attitudes are harmful and overrated.

“It is rare to come across writing on art that does not enormously inflate originality of visual language.

I suspect that this has been a feature of Western critical writing since the 17th century and certainly since very big money entered the art market – in modern terms, about 1956,” he says.

Many works, for example The Bombing of Sakiet (1959, above), African Prison (1959) and the Disparates drawings, take a progressive political stance.

He works in a widely accessible visual language. “It is very important to me that my work should convey something to the untrained eye,” he says.

Either in style, subject matter or both, his works often allude to those by Goya, Daumier, Grosz, Beckmann [see also here and here], Leger, Guttuso and Picasso, which are concerned with conveying clear social or political meanings.

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