Who’s Charlie Pi?

Charlie Pig as The Ideal Woman

Charles Garner left Middlesex University in 1976 with  a B.A. Hons in Fine Art. For several years he worked under the name of Charlie Pig mainly as a performance artist but also as a Synoptic Realist artist running The Synoptic Realist Tie Company promoting and selling Charlie Pig’s Twenty Top Ties,  with Exhibitions at Copyart Camden, The London Film Co-op, Mayfair Illuminations curated by David Medalla , The Midland Group Gallery in Nottingham, and The Air Gallery in the Critics Choice Exhibition, ‘Unquiet Studios’ curated by The Hon Guy Brett.

‘The Synoptic Realist Life-Enhancement Project’ was launched with an illuminated advertisement  in a bus shelter as part of ‘Shoplift’, Lewisham in 1990.

“Charlie P!g’s ties play on a network of opposites: something respectable/dull changed into something outrageous/beautiful, the symbol belonging, of the ‘straight’, into an expression of the outcast, which in turn becomes the badge of a new group of people, and so on.”

“-In reality these artists very often begin with a fascination for some aspect of the physical world, maybe one which is unnoticed or derided- a procedure which is both ambitious and modest. It can give us a new sense of the immensity of events, and of our own limitations of understanding. Far from being fortuitous, I believe this approach is characteristic of the most critical and creative artists working today, by which they  implicitly challenge the neo-conservative tendency to promote a pompous and self-important notion of the artist out of the tradition of the past.” GUY BRETT. tbc