DALLAS OBSERVER 01.26.06
Electric Avenue: Erwin Redl's light installation sits quietly next to Fahamu Pecou's in-your-face painting
By Charissa Terranova

...If the grid is an overt presence in the work of Redl, it is but a pale residue of one-point perspective in the paintings of Fahamu Pecou . Hanging in the adjacent room of the gallery where one enters is a small but visually boisterous collection of Pecou's work titled Fahamu Pecou Is the Shit . Pecou's paintings are a raucous but tidy dismissal of the institutional politics of the art world. Five large paintings of ersatz magazine covers hang on the walls. Each shows the otherwise unassuming artist in pimped-out garb slouching like 50 Cent or styling like P. Diddy. In Pecou's painted replication of the cover of International Review of African American Art , the artist stands with the brown phallus of a cigar drooping from his mouth. He paints himself on a cover of Flash Art leaning against a hip and phat Benz.

Pecou reconstructs an art world with himself, a rising young African-American painter, front and center. He creates an overt politics of inversion and intrusion, sneakily thwarting and taking ownership of a system of political connections, exclusion and sometime whimsical success. Pecou's cosmos is more self-fulfilling prophecy than fantastic suggestion. He is going to be in our face in the magazines because he's already made faux versions of such magazine covers. The images of the artist as a success exist and will make his success a palpable thing. The in-your-face politics of these would-be magazine covers is further heated by the complicated process behind the work. Pecou begins with the theatrical set-up of the image. He strikes a rapper pose alongside hired actors. A professional photographer captures the image, and then Pecou scans or downloads it onto his desktop in order to manipulate it graphically, adding ghetto accolades such as "dat boy is gud." He projects the image on the wall, sketches and paints it, allowing the paint of the figures and words to bleed and drip as a means to "show that it is painting," as he puts it.