LONDON.-The Aquarium presents James Cauty, on view 30 November-24 December 2007. Since 2002 and the invasion of Afghanistan, James Cauty has been designing and making stamps as artworks in response to world events. On 9th September 2007 he handed over the position of chief stamp designer for the Cautese Nationál Postal Disservice (C.N.P.D.) to East European art labourer Filip Filkovic and declared “War Is Over! Al Qaeda – 1, USA - 0”

To commemorate this event, Cauty has remixed some of his finest images created during the war into what he calls ‘reverse engineered’ mixed media collage works and oil paintings. These are the true originals of work created up to five years earlier. Cauty explains the process of reverse engineering as “analysing a subject artwork to create representations of the art at a higher level of abstraction. It can also be seen as going backwards through the development cycle. In this model, the output of the implementation phase is reversed back to the analysis phase in an inversion of the traditional waterfall method.”

The results are raw, brutal and occasionally touching reinterpretations of key histories in the Cauty oeuvre – the Houses of Parliament in a 5/11 style attack, the Beatles ablaze, Mickey Mouse as a winner of hearts and minds, a Bugs Bunny nightmare, the Queen prepared for a gas-attack, God on a mobile and much more. Also to be exhibited for the first time ever, the CNPD specialists have developed the ‘most meaningful black in the world’. At £664.41 per square inch, it will also be the most expensive black, making the 6ft x 6ft painting the costliest depiction of a stamp in the world, with an estimated price in the region of £2.37 million. A consortium of investors has already shown interest in buying the most expensive painting of a stamp, but if the painting fails to sell by Christmas Day 2007, it will be destroyed.

Continuing in the Cauty tradition, The Aquarium is expecting work to be given away for free at the private view of this exhibition on the 29th November. Since burning £1 million on the Isle of Jura in 1994 Cauty has been accustomed to destroying the value of money.