Ironic synchronicity or direct rip-off ?!

A few days ago friend of mine, Mon­sieur G, sent me an e‑mail; he had been in Dublin in 2013 and vis­it­ed my stu­dio, where I showed him the ini­tial pieces of APEX. Among these was “Have a laugh”, the paint­ing of a hye­na on a suit. Instead of being on a reg­u­lar can­vas, the piece was paint­ed direct­ly on a stretch of suit fab­ric, as will be the case with“The Boss” and around six oth­er pieces depict­ing an apex preda­tor in suits.

By the end of Octo­ber 2013, I had put togeth­er a 12 page full colour brochure, out­lin­ing the exhi­bi­tion: time­line, artist state­ment, pieces involved, open­ing event… a sum­ma­ry of the pro­ject­ed series “APEX”. I wrapped every­thing up using the graph­ic design looks of “The Econ­o­mist”, in a con­scious move to empha­size the over­all con­cepts as well as speak­ing in a famil­iar lan­guage to poten­tial spon­sors. Of course, “Have a Laugh” was on the brochure’s cover.

So back to the recent­ly received e‑mail, an alarmed M.G was ask­ing whether I had seen “The Econ­o­mist” lat­est issue, and attached a pic­ture of it’s cov­er. WTF!!! (my words) Has my brochure some­how leaked? It’s been on-line for a while now…Well, I don’t think it had. I believe it’s an iron­ic, bizarre and extreme case of syn­chronic­i­ty or (in my case) antic­i­pa­tion. By the way, my artis­tic life is full of such exam­ples, some of them quite scary (like paint­ing two smok­ing tow­ers in the back­ground of “KZ ball pit”, months before 9/11).

Ideas are float­ing out there. Or at least the raw mate­ri­als which form them even­tu­al­ly in some­one’s mind. To put it in dif­fer­ent words, the dots of real­i­ty are print­ed every day for us to con­nect them or not. For instance, Mar­tin Scors­ese’s The Wolf of Wall Street, based on a Wall St bro­ker’s auto­bi­og­ra­phy, has its title for a rea­son. Inci­den­tal­ly, who­ev­er at The Econ­o­mist came up with the cov­er idea, had clear­ly been influ­enced by Scors­ese’s main­stream fea­ture and per­haps old Vic­to­ri­an age illus­tra­tions of dogs in suits. I cer­tain­ly was­n’t  influ­enced by the first, it was­n’t out there when I start­ed APEX.

For­tu­nate­ly the series is a lot more than this, and goes far deep­er into the preda­to­ry mat­ters of our con­tem­po­rary world. Check for yourselves!

RP Browne