COLLAGES

The Porn Collage Series was a sudden departure by Yeo from paint into collage, with the first of these unorthodox works being the portrait titled Bush, which was made in 2007 after an official commission to paint the then President of the United States, George W. Bush, fell through. Yeo’s initial disappointment led him to making this playful but explicit, collage satirizing the assumed moral superiority of the extreme right in American politics.

The use of clippings from hardcore pornographic magazines as the medium, instead of paint on canvas, gave a humorous and subversive edge to the works. This series, initially known as his Blue Period, with an exhibition of the same title opening in 2008 at Lazarides in Soho, saw him depict subjects as diverse as the moral crusader Mary Whitehouse, to Playboy founder Hugh Hefner and portrait painter Lucian Freud; whose fleshy reworking of his famous self-portrait can be seen as a tongue-in-cheek passing of the torch between generations.

The collages also act as performance pieces, in the sense that there is an act of recognition and transformation in what the viewer sees as they get closer to the work, which initially appear to be a well-constructed, straightforward paintings.

Unlike any of Yeo’s painted portraits, none of the subjects of Yeo’s collage works are a result of any personal connection with the artist. Rather they are based on the subject’s public perception and, whether rightly or wrongly, they are understood to have traded on their sexual morality, which is now inseparable from their public image.