Bjarne Melgaard is literally a self-styled bad boy. The anti-hero subject of his own paintings (along with his mother’s Chihuahua as side-kick), Melgaard depicts his pseudo-biographic tales of misadventure, humorously championing the cause of the misfit, the mongrel and the meek.
Drawing from pop culture with slacker ease and sophistication, comic books, graffiti, and porn become Melgaard’s echelons for painterly subversion, ‘heights’ from which to begin a rakish plummet of epic proportions. Hairy-chested escort agency showgirls cavort predatorily with Gay Satan; the ever-victimised Chihuahua has a moral quandary over the discovery of a dead hooker; buck-toothed Melgaard cries like a girl amidst a barrage of spunk-pumping pricks, socially excluded by purple-headed dogs in puppy sweaters. It’s the stuff of nightmares and therapy addiction: raucous, obscene, humiliating, and thoroughly endearing. Daddy: A Novel By Bjarne Melgaard, a deliciously perverse ‘self-portrait’, merely hints at the literary magnitude (and psychoanalytic depths) of this vulnerable raging character.
