Naughty, but nice | Pop artist Deborah Azzopardi

Deborah Azzopardi, Side Exit, c2004, Acrylic on 450g paper, 72 x 67cm, courtesy of Cynthia Corbett Gallery

Donald McGill… meet Roy Lichtenstein. Deborah Azzopardi paints sexy, saucy, cartoonish scenes in bright colours on large canvases.

Women pull their tops over their heads; louchely lean their long stiletto-tipped legs out of convertible sports cars, and put their fingers in front of their full lips, as if to whisper ‘Shhhh! Let’s keep this our little secret.’

Men feature, too, often from behind, pulling their jeans up over their briefs… or is that down? It’s all naughty, but nice. There are cleavages, glasses of champagne, Cadbury’s Flakes and old-fashioned telephones. Primary blue and yellow pervade, but there are other colours in there: lipstick red figures prominently, too, in Azzopardi’s palette.

And yet… her work is art literate. There are references – as art critic Estelle Lovatt, a big fan, has pointed out – to Manet, to Boucher, to Fragonard. And she’s great at composition, particularly her writ-huge renditions of that cartoon-strip artist’s speciality, the close crop. In a clever crop, what’s left out becomes as important as what’s included.

Because Azzopardi’s work is so influenced by cartoon-strip art, all her pieces act as slices of narrative. You can’t but imagine the preceding and succeeding panels of the strip, and a story emerges. In Bing Bong (2007), who’s ringing the bell… and who’s going to answer the door? In Freedom (2006/20), what on earth is going on inside the sports car? In Side Exit (2004, pictured) where is the green-suited, blue-booted man sprinting off to, in such a hurry, without a glance behind him? Away from danger, or towards excitement? You’ll never know… and you’ll always want to know.

Deborah Azzopardi is represented by Cynthia Corbett Gallery in London, and her work attracted great interest at the 2022 British Art Fair, as you might imagine. The latest solo show of her work, Aspects of Glamour, opened at the 67 York Street Pop Up Gallery in Marylebone on Monday June 26th: the private view, on Wednesday 28th, was, I can tell you, a colourful affair.