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ZEVS (*1977) is a french artist best known for his ‘liquidation’
technique, where he sabotages the logos of major brands and businesses in an
attempt to critique twenty-first century consumer-driven culture. With said
interest in mind, Zevs conceived the exhibit Big Oil Splash based on
Hockney’s 1967 iconic work A Bigger Splash in 2016.
Hockney Series (2012—2020)
by Ángels Miralda
David Hockney’s A Bigger Splash (1967) is today considered among the iconic paintings of the 20th century. As a quintessential painter, Hockney was drawn to the evasive simulacrum of a constantly shifting surface of water. Set in an idyllic private yard behind a modernist apartment, the painting epitomizes the American Dream lifestyle typical of the 1960s. The suburban calm is interrupted by the static, splashing water. In 2012, Tate Modern arranged the exhibition A Bigger Splash: Painting after Performance. The exhibition traced a history of painting from Jackson Pollock to Joan Jonas—establishing a relation between the painted image, the materiality of paint, and its relation to the human body. [1] These are all elements that explain French artist ZEVS dedication to this one painting in particular.
Aguirre Schwarz aka ZEVS came to prominence in the 1990s for his actions against corporate logos in public space. By borrowing the term “liquidation” from corporate lingo and lending it physical shape by dousing company logos in paint, ZEVS points to the inherent violence in desiring the liquidity of assets. Poignantly, to “liquidate” also means to kill by violent means: In the hands of ZEVS paint becomes weaponized as the material of both image-making and of image-destruction. Hockney’s A Bigger Splash became the setting for a series of paintings in which ZEVS studio practice and street practice intermix.
ZEVS’ street practice infiltrates art history through a recreation of Hockney’s painting—today, the recognisable villa might belong to a manager, a CEO or an executive. The once idyllic space becomes a lost paradise with petrol logos from around the world alternately adorning its facade—liquidated by their own product, oil drips and gathers into toxic puddles. Its thick sanguine tracks invade the groomed waters of what we imagine to be the executive’s private pool. The water, once calm, becomes a toxic substance saturated by flammable concentrations of marbling crude oil gathering on the surface.
Aguirre Schwarz / ZEVS, The Big Oil Splash (Exxon Blue / Blue) detail, 2016, 150 × 150 cm, mixed media on canvas. Courtesy: Aguirre Schwarz (aka ZEVS)
Oil moguls prospect oil reserves in the deserts of Saudi Arabia and in the underwater lagoons of the Persian Gulf—but they themselves never reside in the environments that suffer from the toxic consequences associated with the extractive process. In this context, “liquidation” means transporting the natural disasters which these companies are responsible for into the private sphere. Similar to radical actions of eco-activism that cite the widespread phrase “NIMBY” (Not in my Backyard), the action repositions territorial associations in a system which only guarantees non-toxic living to wealthy or geographic elites.
As a nod to Hergé’s Tintin, ZEVS titled the catalogue documenting the series Aguirre Schwarz au Pays de L’Or Noir. In the guise of the unlikely hero who travels across continents to unmask villains, ZEVS exposes interconnected networks of shape-shifting corporations that operate in a de-territorialised world of capital. Singular events seemingly disappear into a vortex of data where news events coalesce into one large global catastrophe. Only this year, the MK Wakashio oil spill off the coast of Mauritius spewed 1,000 tonnes of oil near Pointe d’Esny after colliding into a coral reef. Yet little has been published in the midst of a year where an abundance of catastrophes has laid bare glaringly dysfunctional social and political systems. ZEVS illustrates how executives will only act once the oil is in their own pools—a way of bringing the world home. Ecological disasters of huge proportions are displaced into the insignificant volume of a private pool that belongs to a home paid for in Middle Eastern oil and decorated with palms native to Venezuela.
Although the oil is brought into the frame of the Hockney Paintings through a rogue maneuver, it unveils the relation between the setting to the material that paid for it. This lifestyle is only made possible through extractive regimes that often impede on neo-colonial territories rife with social tension and overburdened by resource curse. For populations who have suffered at the expense of global demand for extraction and the lack of effective carbon curbing measures off the shores of Mauritius, this idea of a lost paradise is very real. In Reza Negarestani’s novel Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials (2008), [2] oil is a creature awakened from the core of the earth. Its complex consciousness cannot be compared to that of a human spirit, but something much darker and tellurian in scale. Through the partially real, partially fictional sciences and philosophies of paleopetrology and pyrodemonism, teratology to the solar rattle, Negarestani’s oil descends through a post-Deleuzian nonlinear reality to form a logic of its own. The sentient Oil comprises the body and mind of an imagined Middle East, whose deserts and open pits of fire possess human minds in order to free its atomic poltergeists into the atmosphere of the living. Oil executives may believe that they are working to enrich themselves, but in Negarestani’s work of theory-fiction, they are simple pawns under the auspice of demonic and radioactive forces deep beneath and above the Earth.
In a similar neo-materialist vein, ZEVS operates with paint as a live agent. Its properties are weaponised, and image-making becomes an act of sabotage. Paint is trained on specific opponents that seem large and de-territorialised— the corporate-behemoth as demon and god. In conversation, ZEVS points out the relationship modern corporations have to Hellenistic hierarchy: “We know who buys the oil, we know who is responsible when it spills, and yet they are untouchable.” [3] Aguirre Schwarz borrows his pseudonym from a regional train that operates in Paris: “Zeus”, homonymous with the Greek god, sluices through the urban underground like the Titans condemned to the underworld—a petro-demonic tsunami that may one day turn the tide of fate.
ZEVS’ connection to Hockney and the swirling iridescent oil-films of the Californian dream villas point out the art world’s own reciprocal relationship with the fossil fuel industry. His appropriation of this particular painting is not as much a criticism of Hockney, as an uncovering of the necessary relationships that artists foster in order to keep their studio practice profitable. In that sense, ZEVS’ mixture of studio and street practice evokes large-scale actions and performances that have successfully won out over firms in the past. This series epitomizes hope, and an affirming conviction that such actions do succeed. Shortly after Tate staged the exhibition A Bigger Splash, the museum gained notoriety for its continued sponsorship by British oil magnate BP, one of the logos featured in ZEVS’ series. In 2015, climate activists occupied the museum, performing a live drawing session in which they covered the Turbine Hall in graffiti that warned of the effects of climate change.The following year it was announced that the BP funding to Tate was to be “liquidated”. While the institution might not consider these unauthorised performances to be part of its programme, they did ultimately change the institution and the history of art.
[1] A Bigger Splash: Painting after Performance, Tate Modern, 14 November 2012–1 April 2013.
[2] Reza Negarestani, Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials, Re.Press, 2008.
[3] Conversation with Aguirre Schwarz (aka ZEVS) 4 September 2020.
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Aguirre Schwarz / ZEVS, The Big Oil Splash (Exxon Blue / Blue) detail, 2016, 150 × 150 cm, mixed media on canvas. Courtesy: Aguirre Schwarz (aka ZEVS)
Hockney Series (2012—2020)
by Ángels MiraldaDavid Hockney’s A Bigger Splash (1967) is today considered among the iconic paintings of the 20th century. As a quintessential painter, Hockney was drawn to the evasive simulacrum of a constantly shifting surface of water. Set in an idyllic private yard behind a modernist apartment, the painting epitomizes the American Dream lifestyle typical of the 1960s. The suburban calm is interrupted by the static, splashing water. In 2012, Tate Modern arranged the exhibition A Bigger Splash: Painting after Performance. The exhibition traced a history of painting from Jackson Pollock to Joan Jonas—establishing a relation between the painted image, the materiality of paint, and its relation to the human body. [1] These are all elements that explain French artist ZEVS dedication to this one painting in particular.
Aguirre Schwarz aka ZEVS came to prominence in the 1990s for his actions against corporate logos in public space. By borrowing the term “liquidation” from corporate lingo and lending it physical shape by dousing company logos in paint, ZEVS points to the inherent violence in desiring the liquidity of assets. Poignantly, to “liquidate” also means to kill by violent means: In the hands of ZEVS paint becomes weaponized as the material of both image-making and of image-destruction. Hockney’s A Bigger Splash became the setting for a series of paintings in which ZEVS studio practice and street practice intermix.
ZEVS’ street practice infiltrates art history through a recreation of Hockney’s painting—today, the recognisable villa might belong to a manager, a CEO or an executive. The once idyllic space becomes a lost paradise with petrol logos from around the world alternately adorning its facade—liquidated by their own product, oil drips and gathers into toxic puddles. Its thick sanguine tracks invade the groomed waters of what we imagine to be the executive’s private pool. The water, once calm, becomes a toxic substance saturated by flammable concentrations of marbling crude oil gathering on the surface.

Oil moguls prospect oil reserves in the deserts of Saudi Arabia and in the underwater lagoons of the Persian Gulf—but they themselves never reside in the environments that suffer from the toxic consequences associated with the extractive process. In this context, “liquidation” means transporting the natural disasters which these companies are responsible for into the private sphere. Similar to radical actions of eco-activism that cite the widespread phrase “NIMBY” (Not in my Backyard), the action repositions territorial associations in a system which only guarantees non-toxic living to wealthy or geographic elites.
As a nod to Hergé’s Tintin, ZEVS titled the catalogue documenting the series Aguirre Schwarz au Pays de L’Or Noir. In the guise of the unlikely hero who travels across continents to unmask villains, ZEVS exposes interconnected networks of shape-shifting corporations that operate in a de-territorialised world of capital. Singular events seemingly disappear into a vortex of data where news events coalesce into one large global catastrophe. Only this year, the MK Wakashio oil spill off the coast of Mauritius spewed 1,000 tonnes of oil near Pointe d’Esny after colliding into a coral reef. Yet little has been published in the midst of a year where an abundance of catastrophes has laid bare glaringly dysfunctional social and political systems. ZEVS illustrates how executives will only act once the oil is in their own pools—a way of bringing the world home. Ecological disasters of huge proportions are displaced into the insignificant volume of a private pool that belongs to a home paid for in Middle Eastern oil and decorated with palms native to Venezuela.
Although the oil is brought into the frame of the Hockney Paintings through a rogue maneuver, it unveils the relation between the setting to the material that paid for it. This lifestyle is only made possible through extractive regimes that often impede on neo-colonial territories rife with social tension and overburdened by resource curse. For populations who have suffered at the expense of global demand for extraction and the lack of effective carbon curbing measures off the shores of Mauritius, this idea of a lost paradise is very real. In Reza Negarestani’s novel Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials (2008), [2] oil is a creature awakened from the core of the earth. Its complex consciousness cannot be compared to that of a human spirit, but something much darker and tellurian in scale. Through the partially real, partially fictional sciences and philosophies of paleopetrology and pyrodemonism, teratology to the solar rattle, Negarestani’s oil descends through a post-Deleuzian nonlinear reality to form a logic of its own. The sentient Oil comprises the body and mind of an imagined Middle East, whose deserts and open pits of fire possess human minds in order to free its atomic poltergeists into the atmosphere of the living. Oil executives may believe that they are working to enrich themselves, but in Negarestani’s work of theory-fiction, they are simple pawns under the auspice of demonic and radioactive forces deep beneath and above the Earth.
In a similar neo-materialist vein, ZEVS operates with paint as a live agent. Its properties are weaponised, and image-making becomes an act of sabotage. Paint is trained on specific opponents that seem large and de-territorialised— the corporate-behemoth as demon and god. In conversation, ZEVS points out the relationship modern corporations have to Hellenistic hierarchy: “We know who buys the oil, we know who is responsible when it spills, and yet they are untouchable.” [3] Aguirre Schwarz borrows his pseudonym from a regional train that operates in Paris: “Zeus”, homonymous with the Greek god, sluices through the urban underground like the Titans condemned to the underworld—a petro-demonic tsunami that may one day turn the tide of fate.
ZEVS’ connection to Hockney and the swirling iridescent oil-films of the Californian dream villas point out the art world’s own reciprocal relationship with the fossil fuel industry. His appropriation of this particular painting is not as much a criticism of Hockney, as an uncovering of the necessary relationships that artists foster in order to keep their studio practice profitable. In that sense, ZEVS’ mixture of studio and street practice evokes large-scale actions and performances that have successfully won out over firms in the past. This series epitomizes hope, and an affirming conviction that such actions do succeed. Shortly after Tate staged the exhibition A Bigger Splash, the museum gained notoriety for its continued sponsorship by British oil magnate BP, one of the logos featured in ZEVS’ series. In 2015, climate activists occupied the museum, performing a live drawing session in which they covered the Turbine Hall in graffiti that warned of the effects of climate change.The following year it was announced that the BP funding to Tate was to be “liquidated”. While the institution might not consider these unauthorised performances to be part of its programme, they did ultimately change the institution and the history of art.
[1] A Bigger Splash: Painting after Performance, Tate Modern, 14 November 2012–1 April 2013.
[2] Reza Negarestani, Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials, Re.Press, 2008.
[3] Conversation with Aguirre Schwarz (aka ZEVS) 4 September 2020.

Aguirre Schwarz / ZEVS, The Big Oil Splash (Exxon Blue / Blue) detail, 2016, 150 × 150 cm, mixed media on canvas. Courtesy: Aguirre Schwarz (aka ZEVS)

ZEVS (*1977) ist
ein französischer Künstler, der vor allem für seine ‘Liquidierungs’-Technik
bekannt ist, bei der er Logos großer Marken und Unternehmen sabotiert, um die
konsumorientierte Kultur des einundzwanzigsten Jahrhunderts zu kritisieren. Diesem
Interesse folgend, konzipierte Zevs 2016 in der Lazarides Gallery die
Ausstellung Big Oil Splash, die sich auf Hockneys ikonenhafte Arbeit A
Bigger Splash von 1967 bezog.
Hockney Series (2012—2020)
von Ángels Miralda