DALLAS MORNING NEWS 01.30.06
Razzle-Dazzle 'em Spectacular lights, outsize ego light up Conduit Gallery
By Janet Kutner

Conduit Gallery is in flash mode - blinding LEDs by the hot New York artist Erwin Redl in one room and brazen paintings promoting his own persona by Atlanta up-and-comer Fahamu Pecou. A cool clash of opposites, one triggering sensory reactions, the other provoking thought.

... Mr. Pecou's works play on provocation. He dubs his Dallas show "NEOPOP and Circumstance," a sly allusion to the pop style in which he paints and the success he's had with his self-marketing.

His paintings are slick spoofs of art-world pretensions, complete with four-letter words and sexual innuendo. He stars in each picture, presenting himself on the cover of serious publications such as Flash Art and the International Review of African American Art and on underground journals such as Stop Smiling magazine, as if he were really hot stuff. Titles reinforce that premise - Dat Boy Gud and Sexy Beast: Part 2, I Can't B Your Lovrrrr .

"It began as a marketing campaign, responding to one that preceded the introduction of the rapper 50 Cent," says Mr. Pecou, who after earning a bachelor's of fine arts in painting from the Atlanta School of Art in 1997, worked as a graphic illustrator for various rap and hip-hop groups in that city.

"I thought it a brilliant phenomenon that someone could just be a star because a poster said so," he explains. "Prior to the marketing campaign, I had never heard of 50 Cent, nor I dare say, had most other people in the world. But when his album dropped, everyone's ear was tuned in."

Bill Bounds, a former Dallas banker who owns the Ty Stokes Gallery in Atlanta, gave Mr. Pecou his first one-person show last year, and an exhibit at Schroeder Romero Gallery in Brooklyn is running concurrently with the Dallas one.

The Dat Boy Gud painting, which includes the words "Dat Boy Is Good!" in big letters, depicts Mr. Pecou sitting on a leather banquette in a vintage Armani suit on the cover of Stop Smiling . Other paintings boast "Fahamu Pecou Leads, You Follow" and "Big Tings a Gwon," as in "big things are going on."