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Internationally acclaimed Australian Pop painter Johnny Romeo makes his thunderous debut in New Orleans with his latest series KINGS OF THE WILD FRONTIER.

Romeo’s new collection of original works sees the world-leading Kitsch Pop provocateur at his most bombastic and brazen, fusing together the irresistible pop hooks of the New Romantic movement with the majestic regalia of traditional royal portraits and the invigorating bullishness of Cubist masters Pablo Picasso and George Condo.

Exhibiting at Graphite Gallery on Royal Street in New Orleans’ French Quarter, Romeo evokes the area’s regal and romantic connections to Paris while paying homage to the restless punk energy that burns at the heart of New Orleans and continues to make it a centre of boundary pushing creativity.

In KINGS OF THE WILD FRONTIER, the artist brings the influence of Cubist master Pablo Picasso and the frenetic expressiveness of neo-Cubist provocateur George Condo to the forefront of his practice, and in doing so has crafting some of his most bold and bombastic works.

Jagged, geometric fragments powerfully disrupt the sleek sheen of Romeo’s Pop royal portraits, lending the works a palpable physicality that evokes the signature garish make-up of New Romantics and Cubism’s radical approach to re-envisioning perceived realities.

Long inspired by the works of Picasso, the artist has skillfully appropriated shapes and figures from his own past works into his latest paintings, twisting and angling them into spirited configurations that breathe new life into his depictions of commanders and rulers.

On a more emotional level, Romeo’s frenzied and distorted portraits interrogate the complex states of mind experienced by royals who have clawed their way to the top, recalling the psychologically fraught imagery and raw irreverence of George Condo.

Becoming a new royal can often be a hilariously awkward transition. In Rain Rich, Johnny Romeo depicts a fresh-faced commoner who has become an emperor, his subtle look of confusion playfully suggesting a disoriented sense of being a fish out of water.

A clever commentary on the British royal family in light of the death of Prince Phillip and the controversies surrounding new royal Meaghan Markle, the young ruler’s befuddled pose with a koala calls to mind amusingly cringe-worthy tabloid photos of royals posing with animals while on official visits. Romeo teases out the growing pains of being an ‘emperor in new clothes’ with further satirical aplomb in the text passage ‘Esquire’, which has been reconfigured to create the word ‘Empire’ to imply an elegant gentleman unexpectedly ascending the ranks to become a new ruler.

With its bright bubblegum colours and thrilling mash-up of Kitsch Pop and Cubism, Rain Rich evokes the dashing dandyism of the New Romantics band Japan and their synth pop classic ‘My New Career’ (1980). The song’s catchy couplet of ‘a different walk of life, that I’ve come to know’ takes on a farcical new life within the work as it paints the picture of a person fumbling their way to the top and questioning how they got there. 

In Johnny Romeo’s Wild Frontier, royalty is not something you are born with, it is something that you forge and cultivate yourself. In Space Song, Johnny Romeo has crafted a hyper-coloured homage to the self-made modern day royals, those who have struggled against the odds to shine bright and carve a name for themselves amidst a hostile world. Standing with magisterial gait at the centre of the work, Romeo’s dandyish count figure is an unapologetic symbol of power and opulence. 

The count’s largely silhouetted velvet cape and extravagant regalia evokes the svelte sophisti-Pop of the iconic art rock band Roxy Music, whose elegant take on smooth, jazz-inflected synth Pop was a major influence on the New Romantic movement. Roxy Music is further referenced in the painting through the title Space Song and its sly allusions to the band’s sleek single ‘The Space Between’ (1982).

Despite its overt extravagance, Romeo ingeniously injects the painting with a disarming emotional core, as seen through the count’s tender embrace of his cat. Furthermore, the sense of nostalgic yearning captured in the count’s single tear cleverly nods to Picasso’s ‘The Crying Woman’, while humanising the count and implying a past characterised by pain and adversity, in contrast to his regal stature today. The shifting of the word ‘Golde’ into ‘Gold’, therefore embodies the count’s transformation, as it touches on the alchemical metamorphosis of the archaic term ‘golde’ from its Yiddish, German and Arabic origins into the gleaming word ‘gold’ that we know today. 

It can be lonely living at the top. Johnny Romeo explores the deep sense of isolation experienced by those in power with bold Cubist imagery and his signature penchant for tongue-in-cheek humour in Teen Tears.

The painting portrays a young, dishevelled royal looking out into the distance with resigned longing as he carefully clutches a lamb in his hand. Subtle hints to the princely figure’s past life are made through the word assemblage ‘Towner’, which has been slickly altered to create the word ‘Tower’.

Romeo’s ingenious wordplay alludes to a high-flying city dweller who has abandoned the excitement of metropolitan life for the solitude of royalty within his stone-cold tower. Shades of ancient rulers such as Alexander the Great shine through Romeo’s use of hyper-masculine, Picasso-esque imagery, but the mightiness of these conquerors is here tinged with a palpable melancholy.

This sense of sadness is further echoed in the title Teen Tears, which thoughtfully evokes images of wearied souls pining for their lost youth while also referencing the iconic New Romantics tracks ‘Tears Are Not Enough’ (1982) by ABC and ‘Because You’re Young’ (1980) by David Bowie. Romeo rounds-off the painting on a surprisingly tender note with the inclusion of the lamb, who symbolises not only the sacrifices one must make to live a life of greatness, but also the forgiveness it takes to make peace with what you have left behind. 

Life is tough for the young royal caught between youthful rebellion and royal distinction. Johnny Romeo explores this dichotomy with a hilarious eye for the absurd in Young Tame.

Drawing inspiration from the animal imagery of David Bowie’s song ‘Teenage Wildlife’, taken from his New Romantic-tinged album ‘Scary Monsters’ (1980), the painting portrays a young earl clasping a baby piglet, his face distended with a Cubist snout as the royal and the creature morph into one. A paragon of good fortune, the pig perfectly encapsulates the earl’s love of affluence and largesse.

There is an air of reticence in the young figure’s stony expression, as he tries to suppress the inner wild child of his youth and embrace the responsibilities of being a distinguished noble. Despite his resistance, however, the earl cannot fully deny his more animalistic tendencies, a point comedically captured in the altering of the word assemblage ‘gnarly’ into ‘earl’.

Read within the context of the painting, the title Young Tame captures the experience of being caught between worlds, and in the words of Adam Ant, wanting to break free from ‘centuries of taming’ to become ‘a wild nobility’. 

Chaos reigns and lawlessness abounds in the jungles of the new wild frontier. In Early Dawn, Romeo playfully subverts our understanding of royalty as inherently dignified and noble, transforming royalty into something more primal and animalistic.

The painting portrays a commander gazing forward with a resigned expression as a monkey cheekily slinks on his shoulder, his face wildly contorted into expressive Cubist fragments that recall the exhilaratingly grotesque madness of American Cubist George Condo. Romeo gleefully ruptures any semblance of poise or dignity in his portrait, instead imbuing his work with a colorful sense of pandemonium that is embodied in the mischievous figure of the monkey.

A clever nod to the song ‘Teenage Wildlife’ from David Bowie’s New Romantic-inspiring album ‘Scary Monsters’ (1980), the monkey symbolizes the joyous freedom of anarchy in the wild frontier, where the animals roam the land and become the new royals.

On a darker level, Romeo examines the way in which our obsession with power corrodes our sense of self and reduces us to a pack of animals devoid of loyalty, a point captured with masterful pithiness through the erasure of ‘loyal’ to form the word ‘royal’. The titular Early Dawn may shine in the new kingdom, but it also spells the twilight of the soul. 

The revolution is upon us, and you are all invited. In New Royal, Johnny Romeo envisions a colorfully vivacious new world where the old structures of power have been dismantled, where titles are rendered redundant, and we have all become royalty.

Bursting with some of Romeo’s most vibrant and explosive color arrangements to date, the painting depicts a Czar-like figure adorned with military regalia clutching his pet chihuahua in a pose that is at once both grandiose and side-splittingly hilarious. The stately canine, coupled with the work’s zesty colour palette, lends New Royal a delightfully Kitsch and fun vibe that underscores the emotional austerity often accorded to royal portraits.

A master of fusing together disparate Pop culture elements, Romeo’s amalgamation of vivid Cubist portraiture, Czarist imagery and rich Soviet reds injects the painting with a frenetic, almost revolutionary zeal that calls on us to rail against the fakes, as highlighted in the erased word assemblage ‘Feign, and usher in the ‘Reign’ of a new type of royal.

The slick sheen and kaleidoscopic hues of the work also recall the disco-inflected synth pop of the New Romantics, which is reflected in the title New Royal and its allusions to Adam Ant’s triumphant refrain of ‘we are the new royal family’ in the iconic Adam & the Ant’s anthem ‘Kings of the Wild Frontier’ (1980). 

In the new wild frontier, to be a royal is to be fabulous. Inspired by the glorious gender-bending of glam rock, the New Romantics fabulously bucked convention and played around with our notions of gender by making the feminine masculine. Dandy Scars is a vibrant sugar rush of confectionary colours, sleek fashionable imagery and Cubist chutzpah that pays homage to the daring Dandyism of the New Romantics, with their penchant for over-the-top make up and outrageous, often regal outfits. Romeo eschews the overt masculinity of traditional royal portraiture for a flamboyant, crimson-lipped prince decked out in the finest regalia looking demurely at the audience as he awkwardly clutches a cat to his heart. Shards of the prince’s face, which have been distorted and appropriated from Romeo’s previous Picasso-esque works, are here twisted into jagged shapes that call to mind Cubism’s fascination with movement and the angular make-up often donned by the New Romantics.

This subversion of what is considered ‘kingly’ or ‘manly’ is taken to absurdly humorous heights in the juxtaposition between the fuzzy feline and the word assemblage ‘Roar’, a word typically associated more with a lion or a tiger. More than just a cute face, however, the cat has its paws exposed and is ready to draw the Prince’s blood, as alluded to in the crossed out word ‘Soar’ (a play on ‘sore’) and the ‘Scars’ taken from the title.

The rhythmic pulse of Adam and the Ant’s ‘Kings of the Wild Frontier’, with its refrain of ‘down below those dandy clothes, you’re just a shade too white’, becomes a call to action in the title Dandy Scars, a statement of intent from the New Royals who are willing to suffer to be comfortable in their own skin. 

With his penchant for larger-than-life theatrics, garish costumes and sophisticated pop songwriting, legendary rockstar David Bowie was not just a major inspiration on the New Romantic movement, but in many ways its patron saint. In Ground Control, Johnny Romeo tips his cap to Bowie’s influence on the New Romantics with an electrifyingly vibrant portrait of a royal with his trusty owl perched on his shoulder.

Both the commander, decked out in high-ranking military garb, and the beast look towards the audience with a steely resolve that evokes both the regal poses of generals from ages past and the bombastic dandyism of Bowie’s glam period.

The spirit of Picasso permeates the painting, as Romeo injects the classical realism of traditional royal portraiture with a refreshing neon-drenched Cubist twist that contorts the commander’s face into that of a bull-eyed warrior driven by an unquenchable thirst for power. This desire to rule through might is captured with sly wit in the word assemblage ‘Sword’, which has been crossed out to form the word ‘Lord’.

Romeo continues the exploration of power and command through the title Ground Control, while also cleverly circling back to David Bowie with its reference to the singer’s iconic ‘ground control to Major Tom’ refrain from 1969’s ‘A Space Oddity’. 

As the wheels of war grind to a halt, it’s time to pull out your dancing shoes and bust a move. Battle Dance is a neon-drenched exploration of the aftermath of conflict, where survivors can finally breathe a sigh of relief and celebrate the spoils of their victory.

In the work, Romeo depicts a young commander lovingly grasping a pet rabbit as a symbol of good luck, the jagged contortions of his Technicolour face recalling both the scars of battle and the raw neo-Cubism of George Condo. Brimming with slick imagery and a delightfully upbeat, candy-coated colour palette, the painting filters the grittiness of war through the garish sartorial-sass and stylish synth-pop of the New Romantics.

The allusions to battle subtly pay homage to ABC’s slickly combative 1982 single ‘Poison Arrow’, while the figure of the smiling commander as battle survivor echoes the seductive throb of Roxy Music’s single ‘While My Heart Is Still Beating’ (1982).

Ascending to royalty with some killer moves to boot, Romeo’s cheeky manipulation of text posits his rabbity royal as a ‘Foreign’ power who claws his way through the ravages of war and lives to tell the tale as the dancing ‘Sovereign’ relishing in the success of battle.

Romeo further plays on the theme of dancing and conflict through the title Battle Dance, with its witty nods to breakdancing and the early days of hip hop.

The road to fame and riches is often paved with controversies that scar for life. Johnny Romeo explores the darker side of royalty in one of his most brazen and ballsy works to date, Super Scream.

In the painting, a decorated general is portrayed clutching a rooster, his face distorted beyond recognition in a style that echoes the psychologically fraught neo-Cubism of celebrated American artist George Condo. Dripping with turgid greens and melancholic royal blues, Romeo’s unsettling, grotesque portrait speaks to a tortured soul whose past sins have marred his very identity and continue to haunt him on his dark ascent to the top, as seen in the locket the figure wears in memory of his former self.

Framed within a contemporary context, Romeo’s tragic aristocrat symbolises our fascination with celebrity controversies and the way in which they can topple the reputations of even the most high-profile public figures. The media’s role in amplifying news about celebrity controversies is humorously denoted through the rooster, whose piercing crow is echoed to comedic effect in the title Super Scream. The general’s ignominious fall from grace is captured with razor sharp wit in the word assemblage ‘Crown’, which slyly conceals the archaic English term ‘Adown’, illustrating that the inexorable march to the throne may be the very road that leads to our own undoing.

Despite its gloomy overtones, there is also an absurdist sense of humour to the work in the form of the rooster, whose presence undercuts the severity of the general figure and lends the painting a dose of Pop levity.