Credit: Far Out / WeFail
The distorted face of Donald Trump, Margaret Thatcher’s skull etched onto a banknote, Mark E Smith lugging around a carrier bag (presumably full of cans): welcome to the political art world of Wefail.
Lingering somewhere between portraiture and hellscapes, Wefail’s depictions of crooked politicians, cataclysms that quickly become memes, and the odd hero of our times thrown in for good measure, have encapsulated the chaos of recent years with unerring horror. There’s a cartoonish element borne from his past profession, shades of Francis Bacon, and a scrawl of justified rage that arrests attention.
Using social media as a gallery wall, the comments alone prove how provocative Wefail’s anonymous work is. “We need this” is never too far away from “love to see you putting your mental illness on your canvas” and “give your head a wobble, you lefty gay” or even “Hitler was right and better than any leader today”. Some of it is also plagued by bots.
The grotesque and revealing nature of the work summons Theodor Adorno’s classic quote: “The splinter in your eye is the best magnifying-glass available”. While the startling immediacy answers to Jean Baudrillard’s proclamation: “We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning”.
Given that art can shape society, Wefail’s increasing exposure on social media imbues it with meaning in a very modern way. So, while keeping the mystery intact, we caught up with Wefail to dive into the motives of his work and present a gallery wall of his most shocking works and the thoughts behind them below.
Wefail on Wefail:
When did you start with WeFail1, and was it originally designed to be pessimistic, sarcastic, or weirdly hopeful?
“I started painting again when Donald [Trump] was first elected back in 2017, it was out of protest really. I felt that his whole campaign was based on division and hate, and my form of protest was to document his presidency in paint. The name WeFail1 is kind of funny because someone sat on my actual name of Wefail on Instagram. They’ve been sat on it for years and never posted a thing. They once reached out to me to say they admired my work so much that they’d taken the Wefail name on IG and I could buy it back from them; I never did.
I’ve been creating things under the name of Wefail since 2003. I used to be an animator mostly and made things for Eminem, The Simpsons, Cartoon Network, X-Games, tons of others. Animation takes so much more time though, and I really don’t miss that. Paint is instant. By the way, Eminem was a fun contract. He was one of the only clients to approve everything right off and allow total artistic freedom; he’s no doubt forgotten all about the job, but I’ll always respect the way he let it go where it was going.”
A lot of art that primarily exists on the internet feels engineered for approval. By contrast, your work often feels deliberately uncomfortable. Is that intentional?
“This is something I’ve always been fascinated with. Painting is one of the only art forms that we primarily expect to be uplifting and joyful. We don’t expect the same from say, movies, music or [the] written word, but with painting we usually expect it to be cheerful. It’s funny to me. Over the years, I’ve had many people reply to my work and tell me that if it was more of a happy time, they’d really like it [laughs].”
“Not everything is a happy time, certainly not in today’s climate. I feel like ignoring that fact as an artist is putting your head deep into the sand.”
Wefail
Why do you think Francis Bacon’s aesthetic feels so resonant today?
“Francis Bacon painted the dark side of the human condition; his work is visceral and violent. The trauma and pain that human beings can inflict on one another, he would be the perfect artist to document our current era. Unfortunately, he would no doubt hate my work because he was right-wing, but saying that, his defence was usually that he couldn’t be bothered with politics.
I try not to paint in any way like Bacon nowadays, initially I was just searching for my own style and I’m a very messy left-hander so blurs and scratches have always been built into my hand, plus I was a Bacon fanatic in my youth and studied all of his work over and over again but I would hate for people to think that I was constantly trying to copy the master. He was unique.”
As an artist who shares their wares on social media, what is your relationship like with the medium? Do you see Instagram as an interactive gallery, a sketchbook, or a necessary evil?
“Out of all the socials, it’s Instagram I love the most because it can be purely visual and immediate when sharing my art. I can post a new painting and say absolutely nothing, just let the work go out and have a life of its own. I treat my account as my own little gallery. I never post myself in any of it because I just want the art to be the show. Also, who knows what that could bring in real life.
I never want anyone approaching me in the street to scream that Donald Trump is a saint and that I’m evil. I’m happy with slight anonymity so that situation never arises. I’ve argued with many bigots in the past, and it goes absolutely nowhere. It’s not something I have the time or energy to do.”
“You’re aligned with Trump and his views, and I’m never going to convince you to change and love all people.”
Wefail
Generally speaking, how have you felt about the volatile reaction to your art (and the bots), and how has that informed your work?
“It doesn’t inform the work at all. I take no feedback and certainly not from those aligned with hate and bigotry. I paint what I feel I need to paint at any given time to document the times we’re living in. I actually try not to exaggerate and just paint exactly what the world is currently going through, but that still comes out as nightmarish, because it is.
You have to blank the trolls and bots out of your mind. Sometimes it gets too much, and I’ll get hundreds of aggressive replies to a piece, but I guess that’s because the painting has directly hit a nerve. My wish is for people to love, respect and treat each other as equals, but that’s now seen as going against the grain and inflammatory.”
Which emotion do you trust most in art?
“Any emotion, as long as it’s your truth. Don’t try to paint a subject or emotion that you feel will sell to the public; paint what your gut tells you to paint. Unfortunately, for me, my gut told me to paint the evils that our leaders do. I wish it had told me to paint horses frolicking in a meadow or rainbows.”
What do you think your art captures? And how does that define Wefail?
“I just want my art to capture now, the times we’re living in. My hope is that when we’re all gone, aliens will find my art on planet Earth, and from it they will decipher how we went extinct”.
