Scene I: Glen Pudvine, Mug

Matt Carey-Williams, Sandy Lane, Wiltshire, December 2023

Glen Pudvine, The Way You Move, 2023, Oil on linen92 x 72 cm. (36 1/4 x 28 3/8 in.)

‘Mug’. Funny little word. One that seems taxed by its own onomatopoetic groan, especially when enunciated with a northern English accent, transforming that middle ‘you’ into a protracted ‘ooh’, imbued with its own crabby lament. Yet this three-letter word, despite its apparent syllabic simplicity and aural breviloquence, is as bouncy as a Space Hopper when it comes to Index, jumping up, in, down and out of various streams of Signification.

A mug is a rather down-to-earth drinking vessel; it’s also slang for one’s face. Mugs are also rather gullible people, easily deceived, but are also certain criminals – muggers – intent on mugging you – stealing from you on the street – often in broad daylight. Finally, there’s the act of ‘mugging down’: that peculiarly teenage hopscotch from first to second to maybe even third base, without ever scoring a home run.

So it is that the word ‘mug’ presents us with a trajectory of manifestation, morphing between yet equally gripping the status and fluidity of object, subject, and action. One that flashes as both noun and verb; speaks in past, present, and future tenses; subsumes both individual and collective identities whilst simultaneously probing banality, irony, jeopardy, and the erotic. Glen Pudvine’s Scene, entitled Mug, invites the viewer to join all these dots together to get a better handle on the inquiry and gravity of the significance his mug and mugs collectively stream.

GLEN, ISAAC, JON, AND FRASIER

Pudvine’s He’s Listening (2022) marks the beginning of this body of work. Stretched around a simple mug is a portrait of the artist’s nephew, Isaac, taken from a photograph of him just minutes after he was born. His convex face echoing the big, final push he and his mother orchestrated together but moments before he unwittingly posed for this first mugshot.

Glen Pudvine, He's Listening, 2022, Oil and grit on linen, 101.5 x 91.5 cm (40 x 36 in)

The background buzzes in grisaille pixelation, signifying the static noise one sees and hears on televisions and radios that have lost their signal; a plane that connotes shades of loss and uncertainty, challenging young Isaac as he innocently, almost blindly stares into his future. It also clearly piques the attention of Frasier Crane, the psychiatrist from the eponymous American TV sitcom, who eyes Isaac from afar, somewhat shrilly, whilst embryonically captured in an ovoid shape resting between the mug’s handle. Frasier wears large earphones, listening – along with Isaac – for a sound or sight of explanatory signal that will never materialise.

Yet this deafening, deadening doubt is mollified somewhat by the tender narrative that surrounds this specific mug because this mug is Pudvine’s own mug; the one he drinks coffee out of every day. The familial beat between uncle and nephew is nourished further by the presence of Frasier because Pudvine and his father, Jon, would watch Frasier every morning whist drinking coffee together when he first moved to London and lived with his father. Father, son, and grandson are thus ineluctably connected in this work, with all three of them listening intently to what initially sounds like the crackle of estrangement but which, ultimately, tunes both them and us into that space where known effloresces out of unknown. Where family can be fostered as much by the fruits of fiction as by the fertility of fact.

THE FIRST PISS OF THE DAY

The nexus Pudvine forges between commonality and commonplace, sounded in objects so pedestrian or behaviour so personal that they glory in a banality burrowed between tongue and cheek, is continued in Good Morning (2023). Whilst the mug as drinking receptacle is missing here, the form of its handle, at least, is evinced by the curvature of the toilet down on which the artist gazes.

Glen Pudvine, Good Morning, 2023, Oil on linen, 50 x 40 cm (19 3/4 x 15 3/4 in)

We know this because we see his reflected (and like his nephew’s swollen) mugshot in the water at the bottom of the toilet. Or do we? The lack of aqueous shimmer, together with how neatly Pudvine’s self-portrait chimes with the (again) ovoid toilet bottom, offers a bounty of other readings. It certainly feels that he – as reflection and therefore object – is confronting us as the viewer (even if that confrontation is supposedly second-hand), so that the toilet – so utilitarian that it fetishizes banality into unspoken abjection – acts as a kind of portal. From where to where, however, remains steadfastly and deliciously unclear. Staring down yourself down a toilet whilst about to pee on yourself also begs the question as to how good this morning is. Not as a first greeting of the day but as the time and space, the moment, and its concomitant memory that it occupies and then manipulates.

NOT SCALING BUT SKULLING

Skulls feature in two of the works included in this Scene: Mammal (2023) has a tiny, distorted skull, purloined from Holbein’s The Ambassadors (1533, London, The National Gallery), zipping diagonally across its lower right corner. A larger, frontally depicted skull rests on Pudvine’s self-portrait in Glen and Gibraltar 1 in Perugino (2023). As the title reveals, this skull is that famous, first find of a Neanderthal skull in 1848 and which now lives in The Natural History Museum in London.

Glen Pudvine, Glen and Gibraltar 1 in Perugino, 2023, Oil on linen, 60 x 60 cm. (23 5/8 x 23 5/8 in.)

Pudvine’s employment of skulls here tests several genealogies: journeys from pre-history to present; from ethereal to celestial; from self to other. All of which are presented as an interrogation of the artist’s own face and which, in turn, raise questions about depiction, perspective, experience and truth. Police mugshots are meant to be unquestionably unadorned. Often cruelly so. They are born from moments of crisis or shifts in the order of things. So it is that Mammal marks the transition from present self, registered by Pudvine’s focus on his pierced ear, to a future that could swing either positively or negatively, as described by the found, cliché image of an alien that sits on a mug.

No-one has ever seen an alien in person and yet we all instantly recognise this figure – even when sliced down the middle – as one, with their hand raised in supplication or aggression. That influence on and assumption of various visual codes, and the panorama or proportion they control, likewise reverberates in Glen and Gibraltar 1 in Perugino. This time Glen stares out from a vista taken from a painting by Perugino (a fact born of fiction that reinvents its fiction as a fact) with his likeness now addled by the floating skull hovering over it. The truth of the skull and its status as signifier of my, your and Glen’s ancestry coheres with the assumed truths (and the perspectives they offer) that we invest ourselves in and the resulting imbroglio of entangled experience that follows.

Glen Pudvine, Mammal, 2023, Oil on linen, 62 x 52 cm. (24 3/8 x 20 1/2 in.)

The mugshot, as physical and psychological phenomenon – supposedly the leitmotif for melodies of indefatigable veracity – now shivers in shadows of pixelated, anamorphic dubiety. Scale now skulled by bones recalibrating those skeletons of time and space that colour our experience – remembered or imagined – and our anticipation of, apprehension for, and complete frustration with it.

THE HANDS THAT GIVETH ARE THOSE THAT TAKETH AWAY

The previous two works see Pudvine engage explicitly with motifs or images carefully shoplifted from the annals of art history. Hands (2023) and Present (2023) continue such delightful robbery, with both paintings quoting famous passages from celebrated cave paintings, along with the addition of a detail of Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s The Abduction of Proserpina (1621-22, Rome, Galleria Borghese) in Hands.The libidinal energy that throbs in Bernini’s marble masterpiece finds its apotheosis in the moment that Pluto grips the thigh of Proserpina; his fingers pressing into her flesh in an act both lustful and rapacious. Pudvine has registered that detail on a mug; a tiny vignette that speaks to both Eros and Thanatos, as well as the cycle of generation, destruction, and regeneration as described in Ovid’s metamorphic tale regarding the god of the underworld and the goddess of agriculture he abducts.

Glen Pudvine, Hands, 2023, Oil on linen, 80 x 100 cm (31 1/2 x 39 3/8 in)

Pudvine’s real design is to not to capture the ripple of that sensuous yet salacious grip, but to capture our celebration of it. As object but one which, by extension, numbs our understanding of the crux of Ovid’s distressing tale. Much in the same way that his own hand clutches an iPhone with a photograph of a cave painting of hands in Argentina emblazoned across it. Hands that seem to reach out for help yet could equally be understood as raised in festivity. Hands wobbles between the pre-historic, Renaissance and the contemporary, concentrating on images that oscillate between joyful desire and rabid assault. Hands that appear to give love yet clearly take away liberty much as the mug itself attempts to unveil a truth that none of us can really handle.

Glen Pudvine, Present, 2023, Oil and sand on linen, 92 x 72 cm (36 1/4 x 28 3/8 in)

The hand that holds three stones in Present are proffered by Pudvine’s partner, Shrirekha, here depicted nude (a status that continues to spark the erotic pulse of Hands.). This time, however, the hand effects a sweet and sentimental gesture; one that offers both the artist and his viewer a present. Three stones for three different presents and which strike a chord with the trinity of object, act and state absorbed in Glen’s mugs.

Overlapping this generous figure is a stone mug adorned with an image of a cave painting of a bull; a painting believed to have been executed in order to track time. So it is that stone – the bedrock of our planet seen here as pebbles and a cave wall – is employed by Pudvine to denote the passing of time, scratched away by primitive artists, or eroded by Nature herself. The mug now becomes both bequest and a behest to do more than just be and be more than just now.

Something as banal as a mug now sings a duet to the wit and iniquity, charge and personality of artist and viewer, arrested over oceans and caverns of time. If Pudvine’s mugs say anything, however, it is that they ask for us to focus on the trial of truth we all witness daily and the protagonists who – with so many in power – attempt to mug us of it. For it’s the face of truth, whether hidden by an apple or distorted by a mug – acting freely as both manifestation and meaning – that truly matters. Who and why you are being the big questions that only the vagaries of life and the certitude of death can really answer. All we can do along the way is pray for a love shared or a hatred quashed in those temples of the past and across those blueprints for the future and hope all the mugs we’ll meet, paintings we’ll see and shots we’ll avoid will make the journey just that little bit easier.