Hospitals, Piers, Masks and Sneezing

"In these times of coronavirus crisis, ordinary words like ‘hospitals, masks and sneezing’ have a meaning that they did not have just a few weeks ago. But for Sharif Persaud, an artist with autism, such words have always been obsessions very close to the surface. And recently we too have become obsessed by all these – perhaps, with the possible exception of piers – but if like Persaud, you come from Hastings, even this obsession is entirely reasonable!

This painting is not conventionally beautiful or aesthetic: it’s full of drips of black paint, but this is not the point. Neither is it an expression of painterly technique and perfect representation, of a supermarket or a face, for instance. We have photographs for what we think of as faithful images. We have chocolate boxes for beautiful and comforting ones. I see Persaud’s creative process as dredging down and examining what is beneath the surface, the pebbles close to the bottom of his being. Perhaps with autism these pebbles, these obsessions, are closer to the surface.

“Normal” people – (whoever they might be) – are “better” (whatever that is) able to hide these obsessions. “Normal” people, in their normal everyday lives, develop a thick carapace, a skin, and are less able to dredge the depths of their personality or soul. But we do not live in “normal” times. Being slightly out of kilter can mean that you can see yourself and your world more clearly – if you are on the edge of society, have a brain injury, are disabled, autistic – or in lockdown. What is often seen as a disadvantage, can quickly become an advantage, even a superpower.

The obsession with masks is evident in much of Persaud’s work. Masks are deeply psychological and complicated. Why is Persaud so obsessed by them? I am not sure. My theory is that the white face in the right centre of the painting is a mask of one his particular obsessions, the pub landlord – a character created by the comedian Al Murray. But is the face in the painting the mask of the pub landlord, Al Murray playing the pub landlord, the Real Al Murray, or Persaud playing one of these characters? I said that masks were complicated.

Comparison between Persaud’s painting and that of other artists come to mind. For me, unalloyed naïve art does not exist – we all draw from what we see, unconsciously, from the same zeitgeist. When I see this painting, what comes to my mind is graffiti art, particularly that of Jean-Michel Basquiat. There are the drips of paint, the combination of words and images, the collection of seemingly naïve drawings – but even for Basquiat (and I am a fan), there is no one work that brings together his key obsessions in the way this one does.

People may say “isn’t it a good thing that Sharif, despite being an autistic person, has his art hanging in a gallery. This must be very therapeutic for him.” And in some ways, they may be right. BUT a lot more is going on than this. The dangers of this one-sided, paternalistic way of seeing things is that the person making the art is belittled, and the person doing the patronising, at best misses out on learning from the artwork. It is pigeon-holed as outsider art (not Real Art), or at worst, isn’t even looked at.

I believe Persaud’s art, as well as having been therapeutic for him to create, can influence those of us who truly look at it – and go on to change how we see ourselves and our world as we emerge from these difficult times."