As with many ancient texts, no original manuscript exists for the Apocalypse of Saint John. Reportedly, some commentators, principally within the Greek Orthodox church, propose that the original was written directly onto the walls of the cave in Patmos, now a UNESCO World Heritage Site, said to have been occupied by the hermitical writer.

The notion of this apocalyptic vision first existing as a work of extended graffiti scrawled sequentially onto the walls of a cave by an isolated hermit is a fascinating one. This would certainly explain the labyrinthine and sometimes repetitive structure of the writing. It becomes fascinating to re-imagine it as a diagrammatic scrawl. An extended flow-chart of scribbled allusions. It’s frenetic texts and symbols becoming the obsessive doodling of an esoteric recluse. A work which was as much graphic and visual, as it was textual.

The aesthetics of graffiti, diagrammatic, spontaneous, interspersing fragmented texts with cartoonistic drawing and mark making, is a visual device that has always interested me as a visual artist.

In 1984, I played with the aesthetics of the cartoon in combination with raw hand-written texts with two works that visited the metaphorical narrative of the ‘Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse’. The first work, created in early1984 was exhibited at Battersea Arts Centre, London in November-December 1984, in what was to be the final show by the Blk Art Group. This was a large-scale work painted on four cotton bed sheets stitched together, and using pigment, wax and flour. Its use of extreme caricature and it raw physical quality was heavily influenced by contemporary political cartoonists such as Gerald Scarf and Ralph Steadman.

However, this work proved to be physically unstable (due to the use of wax and flour) and the theme was revisited later in 1984 having moved to the RCA in London. The theme of the Four Horsemen were revisited in the form of four free hanging canvas banners produced initial for the exhibition ‘New Horizons’ held at the G.L.C Royal Festival Hall in January 1985, and re-shown in 1986 at the ICA London as part of New Contemporaries.

This work featured the combining of crudely rendered bodies of four figures taken from the politics of the 1980s, each with a grotesque cartoon-like horse’s head. This juxtaposing of the horse’s head on a human body had been influenced by the sculptural work of Malcolm Poynter who had presented a Lecture on his work in the early 1980s at Trent Polytechnic, Nottingham where I was an undergraduate student.

Emerging initially out of New York Graffiti milieu of the late 1970s as the enigmatic SAMO, Basquiat overlaid the ‘urban’ with an intense intellectual engagement with art world canonical figures such as Cy Twombly, Jean Dubuffet, A.R. Penck and Andy Warhol.

This combination left us, over the span of a brilliant but tragically short career, with a body of work which according to Franklin Sirmans, ‘appropriated poetry, drawing, and painting, and married text and image, abstraction, figuration, and historical information mixed with contemporary critique’ (p91). Rachel Smith builds on this, citing Basquiat as ‘record(ing) a new epic, in the style of what Derek Walcott calls the “New Adam” constructed from the tension created by the assimilation of the visual traditions of both the colonizer and the colonized. He combines Medieval European artistic tropes with those emanating from Africa and the Caribbean’.