One of the newer statements from Chris Labrooy, ‘911’ explores ideas hiding under the hood of the iconography of excess, using digitally rendered repetitions of a classic automobile—the 1973 Porsche Carrera—to blur the line between satire and fetishism until it ceases to be relevant.

Labrooy’s work has, in the past, explored interlocking repetitions to establish a nervous dialogue between digital and analog. ‘Tales of Auto Elasticity,’ for example, begins with a 1950’s Southwestern road-sign advertising narrative destination (analog), but only muses about the elevation of historical influence over the influenced, and the endless repetitions that result (digital), thereby subverting the narrative. In the most striking image of ‘Auto Aerobics,’ we find three copies of the same model Pontiac; two are interlocked and trapped inside the hollow chassis of a third, making all complicit in entrapment. The analog is rendered only digitally in these landscapes, and analog and digital each desire the absence of the other; frisson arises out of the simultaneously claustrophobic and comic results.

‘911’ initially appears more playful, before accumulation reveals the message. In this landscape, pink Porsches are netted pell-mell like fish, and float stationary over the façade of a stark contemporary house. A fleet of aquamarine Porsches rises militant-disciplined out of a swimming pool, displacing water and threatening a mechanized coup. A lost, snow-white Porsche has fallen into an inescapable man-made cavern nearly as bleached as its paint job, and is reclining in its entrapment stiff, uneasy, and comfortable. One Porsche drives over another in a predatory and mechanical vision of nature.

Labrooy’s vision often hides the unease of Kafka’s hunger artist sitting down at a Thanksgiving buffet. Even his advertisements frequently achieve their fascinating effect by subverting their own message, often self-consciously selling excess as itself, thereby taking no position at all. Warhol, too, voiced the nasty manipulation hiding under representation; his cultural frustration, too, was dispelled by elevating ideas of kitsch, and questioning the validity of self-expression in the postmodern world. Following Warhol’s lead, ‘911’ is an interesting commentary on Western ideals of transition, and a savagely comic examination of the profound failure of those ideals.

Chris Labrooy is a Royal College of Art graduate, graphic designer and professional artist who lives in London; his clients include Apple, Nike, British Airways, Time Magazine, and Ted Baker.