“ V. Van Gogh : Ouch ! * @ ? ”. An artist name and a brief statement; one amongst one hundred listed. Composed in white, bold and capitalised letters on a deep blue background, Van Gogh’s name stands out, followed by Davies’ witty commentary of the Dutch artist on a background of fuchsia pink. The appearance of the artwork - rows and columns of text raised on uneven squares of block-colour - is minimalistic and its communicative style quietly demands the attention of the passer-by, eagerly wanting to find out who comes next. To the art savvy, they are all there. Pablo Picasso, Jackson Pollock, Damien Hirst, David Hockney and ninety-six others. Innocently and colourfully boxed up as the fun one hundred.

Peter Davies knew many of the prominent artists whom unknowingly were chasing the number-one spots of his text-paintings from the late nineties. They were friends and friends-of-friends, circling the London art scene a few years before the break of the millennium. And the rest were personal art-heroes or name-drops from the higher echelons of the of the art world; artist one knew - or ought to know - from the gossip and whispers at the invite-only private views and rooftop pool parties.

A young artist himself, Davies had recently finished his studies at London’s Goldsmith College in 1996, and now treading the path provocatively tiled by the likes of Damien Hirst, Abigail Lane and Jenny Seville. They were the Young-British-Artists, or YBA’s; a generation of contemporary British artists graduating a decade earlier and quickly consolidating themselves as the new establishment. Proceeding into the real world with an MA in Fine Art from Goldsmith, the same college as the media-frenzied YBA’s, Davies and his fellow graduates had the attention of risk-seeking collectors and gallery owners, watching their moves in pursue of the new-new artists.

While at Goldsmith, Davies’ had formed a highly intuitive practice. Repeated patterns were pencil-drawn on canvas and filled-in with complimentary and clashing colour. From a distance, the artist’s large-scale compositions - some three by six meters - bend and move within the constraints of the wooden frame around the canvas, often resembling a loose-hanging light-woven fabric, created an optical illusion by the viewer’s eyes trying to focus and re-focus on smaller adjacent areas of the irregular and flowing patterns. Though visually different from the tables and charts of fellow artists that followed, the two forms of expression were not conceptually apart. Both coming from somewhere deeply spontaneous where one insignificant thought, or geometrical shape, spirals into diagrams connecting people, beliefs, concepts and ideas.

One of the first text-paintings, The Hot One Hundred, Davies used a well-known chart structure from the music industry, like the ‘Billboard Hot 100’, to humorously comment on artists and their works; as if it was just another commodity. Although Billboard tends to chart a short time-intervals, like weekly or annual Top-100 charts, Davies went all-in and expanded his time frame to centuries of art history. The who’s who of one hundred artists, with a catchy by-line explaining their contribution to the hot-list in the world of art: from Titian, the famous Venetian renaissance painter of the sixteenth’s century, to one of the pioneers of optical art, Bridget Riley.

In The Fun One Hundred Davies shifts the criteria to make it into his chart from ‘hot’ to ‘fun’, quietly noting that some of us are more ‘fun’ than others. “David Hockney : pool attendant”, references the well-known series of swimming pool paintings Hockney made whilst living in California during the sixties, and “Sol Le Witt: interior decorator”, delightfully remarks on the geometric wall drawings the American Minimalist was best known for.

The Fun One Hundred is a breath of fresh air amongst highbrow art world opinions that put artists on pedestals as Davies brings them down to a user-friendly level.

The series of text paintings, such as The Fun One Hundred, ‘The Hot One Hundred’ and ‘Super Star Fucker’, have the comforting visual appeal of a minimalist painting combined with the reassuring structure of a flow- or top chart. However, the expectations of a rational construct vanish once the viewer gets closer to the works as Davies intentionally shows a mindful disregard for the rules of presenting charts. They are hand-drawn and filled-in by vibrant colours which adhere to a personal intuition rather than the rationality ordinarily used to quickly pass messages in charts.

Noticed by the Charles Saatchi and included in the British art collector’s controversial exhibition ‘Sensation’ at London’s Royal Academy in 1997, Peter Davies debut in the art world was on fast track by the time of his graduation at Goldsmith. In 2000, his work ‘Small Touching Squares Painting’ were exhibited as part of Tate Britain’s show ‘Recent Acquisition’ - and within two years he won the prestigious John Moores prize with the text painting ‘Super Star Fucker - Andy Warhol Text Painting’. The continuous representation by The Approach gallery for three decades have seen the artist’s works exhibited widely through solo shows and group exhibitions in the past two decades.

The screenprint edition of The Fun One Hundred began in December 2000 just a few weeks before the canvas painting, sharing the same title, were exhibited at the artist’s show at the Gagosian Gallery in London. Originally created in more than one hundred colours, it was quickly realised that such a vast number of manually layers of ink on a work on paper would be beyond challenging for a printed edition. The vibrant result, an impressive 25-colour print edition of 250, signed and numbered on front, was released in an exclusive collaboration between Peter Davies and Eyestorm.

You can find the print edition and see the work in more details on Peter Davies artist page here.