Rather than visitors from outer space, these happy spooks seem to be spectres from an inner space made radiant, luminous and childish by MDMA, the Happy Hardcore movement’s mood-altering chemical of choice. Potenza claims he hasn’t taken ecstasy, but it’s irrelevant: the young painter seems to have been steeped at baptism in a vat of the stuff, rather as the young Obelix was steeped in magic potion. Ecstasy, with its irrational exuberance, informs the mood and the mythos that underpins all his work. Potenzaworld – like Kostabiworld before it – is a loopy, ecstatic place.
If his bi-cultural heritage hammered a block wedge between the young Potenza and the dreary Scotland in which he grew up, serious generational gaps soon also opened up between Scotty and his tutors. Sandy Moffat, his assigned teacher at Glasgow School of Art, had had no trouble connecting his star pupil of the 1980s – the late, great Steven Campbell – with Otto Dix or Vincent Van Gogh. But the arrival of a young painter who cited 180BPM ravers Hixxy and Mental Theo as antecedents was too alien, and the genial Moffat washed his hands of Potenza, declaring him “unteachable”. It was as if Marcel Duchamp had appeared fully-formed in a 19th century art school still centred on life drawings of the Winged Victory of Samothrace.
“When the housewife is lazy, the cat is industrious,” says the old proverb. And so it was that rave clubs on Ibiza took the place, in Potenza’s biography, of painting professors, and the energy of electronic dance music took over from the flagging thrust of a Neo-Expressionist revival which, by 1990, had clogged into self-parody and mannerism. The wild brush-strokes of Chia and Baselitz – not to mention a thousand imitators – were beginning, by this time, to pall into a trompe l'oeil approximation of Weimar Berlin presided over by Bush the Elder. The New World Order would be based on something much more primal and idiotic.
If the light and colour of Tunisia were the “final revelations” which made the young Paul Klee into a truly modern painter, it was the 1992 gabber single Poing by Rotterdam Termination Source which broke Scotty Potenza through to his comfortably postmodernist, defiantly happy signature style. Anyone who has heard the record will remember forever its insistent, buddhistically-empty refrain, the gigantic and remorseless sound of a broken spring being tweaked by a sadistic god in a cosmic void, over and over again: poing poing poing poing poing poing poing poing poing poing poing poing poing poing poing poing poing poing poing poing…
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Rather than visitors from outer space, these happy spooks seem to be spectres from an inner space made radiant, luminous and childish by MDMA, the Happy Hardcore movement’s mood-altering chemical of choice. Potenza claims he hasn’t taken ecstasy, but it’s irrelevant: the young painter seems to have been steeped at baptism in a vat of the stuff, rather as the young Obelix was steeped in magic potion. Ecstasy, with its irrational exuberance, informs the mood and the mythos that underpins all his work. Potenzaworld – like Kostabiworld before it – is a loopy, ecstatic place.
If his bi-cultural heritage hammered a block wedge between the young Potenza and the dreary Scotland in which he grew up, serious generational gaps soon also opened up between Scotty and his tutors. Sandy Moffat, his assigned teacher at Glasgow School of Art, had had no trouble connecting his star pupil of the 1980s – the late, great Steven Campbell – with Otto Dix or Vincent Van Gogh. But the arrival of a young painter who cited 180BPM ravers Hixxy and Mental Theo as antecedents was too alien, and the genial Moffat washed his hands of Potenza, declaring him “unteachable”. It was as if Marcel Duchamp had appeared fully-formed in a 19th century art school still centred on life drawings of the Winged Victory of Samothrace.
“When the housewife is lazy, the cat is industrious,” says the old proverb. And so it was that rave clubs on Ibiza took the place, in Potenza’s biography, of painting professors, and the energy of electronic dance music took over from the flagging thrust of a Neo-Expressionist revival which, by 1990, had clogged into self-parody and mannerism. The wild brush-strokes of Chia and Baselitz – not to mention a thousand imitators – were beginning, by this time, to pall into a trompe l'oeil approximation of Weimar Berlin presided over by Bush the Elder. The New World Order would be based on something much more primal and idiotic.
If the light and colour of Tunisia were the “final revelations” which made the young Paul Klee into a truly modern painter, it was the 1992 gabber single Poing by Rotterdam Termination Source which broke Scotty Potenza through to his comfortably postmodernist, defiantly happy signature style. Anyone who has heard the record will remember forever its insistent, buddhistically-empty refrain, the gigantic and remorseless sound of a broken spring being tweaked by a sadistic god in a cosmic void, over and over again: poing poing poing poing poing poing poing poing poing poing poing poing poing poing poing poing poing poing poing poing…