Some may claim there is nothing new under the sun in the art world, and while Llandudno’s Oriel Mostyn exhibition Anathemata would not necessarily counter this belief, it seems likely that it is the first-ever exhibition to source its displayed material from the respective personal archives of scandalous avant-garde French writer Pierre Guyotat and former Wales and Manchester United centre-forward Mark Hughes.
And even if that dynamic duo doesn’t sit at the exact intersection of your interests, several more great creative minds are represented here in a show running throughout autumn and most of the winter, with the notion of the epic poem the approximate theme for Pierre-Alexandre Mateos and Charles Teyssou’s curation.
Guyotat, who died last year aged 80, is one of four artists represented here who created radical work in the 20th century – in his case, astoundingly visceral texts including Eden, Eden, Eden and Tomb For 500,000 Soldiers which are neither novels nor poems exactly but do feature ceaseless sexual violence meted out to man, woman and sheep alike. British playwright Sarah Kane’s short body of work – she died in 1999 aged 28 – expressed a comparably brutal, war-fixated outlook in Blasted, her best-known production; she was also a Man United supporter who wrote of the parallels between their matches and Greek mythology, hence the presence of Hughes’ 1985 FA Cup final shirt.

David Jones, an Anglo-Welsh painter and poet whose most notable written work lends its name to this exhibition, was traumatised – and artistically influenced – by his experiences in the World War I trenches, expounding on it at length later on. Antonin Artaud, another icon of transgressive French literature, ducked out of the conflict on account of his laudanum addiction but, like Jones, went on to craft texts of vast historical, religious and philosophical scope.
As well as these four late scribes, Anathemata features new work from Martin Bladh and Karolina Urbaniak, who display a video work based on Artaud’s vision of a global apocalypse; James Richards, a Cardiff-born multimedia artist who tells a stormy tale in 80 slides; and Paul-Alexandre Islas, an “artist, DJ and sex worker” whose There Will Be Blood is talked up as being post-Artaud in its ethos.
Oriel Mostyn, Llandudno, until Sun 6 Feb. Admission: free. Info: here
words NOEL GARDNER
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