Expresso Expression

Circa 1980
Screen print
80 x 76 centimeters

Cool Clones, the print made before this presented a couple of corporate clones in front of an anonymous office building. Expresso Expression presents its antithesis, a couple of serious looking guys dressed in dark tee-shirts scowling their dislike of that world. It can be seen as a companion piece, a lower keyed obverse of the shiny environment the Cool Clones have unquestioningly assimilated.

The title is an obscure pun on 1950s Beatnik counter-culture and their adoption of espresso coffee as a fashionable statement of their difference to 'straight' culture. Existentialist philosophy also played an important role in forming the Beats' thinking and this is acknowledged by the building's name, Hotel Existenzia.

Backgound of the screen prints 1977-1981