Peel Quickly

Looming mysteriously from the black and brown areas of the picture, the totemic figure in Peel Quickly, executed in 1984, evokes a potent power over both the viewer, and the seeming worshippers in the background. Basquiat presents us with an image that lurks beyond the threshold of our understanding, showing a scene from a mythology that remains faintly alien. The black figure, apparently being worshipped by the background characters, reminds us of the black heroes that populate so many of Basquiat's works, and yet his lack of identity, of halo or of the other visual pointers that the artist so favored, makes him all the more powerful as an unidentified character. These do not resemble the figures from popular culture who figure in so many of Basquiat's paintings, but instead are the strange and unnamed characters from his own private mythology. He has eschewed the increasingly rigid iconography of his Pop-influenced works, replacing it with an art reminiscent of the folk and voodoo art of New Orleans, Puerto Rico and Haiti, striving after a visual language that explored and reflected both his race and his personality.
The sheer vitality of Peel Quickly, with its scrawled figures in the background and the gestural application of slabs of paint in other parts, appear to betray his stated influences, Cy Twombly and Franz Kline respectively. However, it was the street art through which he had initially made his name that really formed the backbone of his distinctive visual style. The combination of the raw art of the street with echoes of the mysticism of the South makes Peel Quickly a heady testimony to Basquiat's own heritage and to his unique visual language.