Brace yourself as your good fortune twists into your worst nightmare in Johnny Romeo’s gloriously unhinged fusion of Japanese folklore and vintage B-grade horror, Happy Now. As Australia’s leading Pop artist, Romeo has captivated major collectors both at home and internationally with his electrifying Kitsch Pop commissions. Rip Dip Alert is a special commissioned piece that showcases Romeo’s uncanny knack for bringing his collector’s visions to life, as he masterfully captures the emotional rawness of having your heart ripped out. In Japanese tradition, the Maneki-neko (‘beckoning cat’) is a prominent symbol of good fortune that appears everywhere from households, to store counters and restaurants. Inspired by the campy gore of grindhouse horror, Romeo puts a gleefully murderous spin to the benevolent cuteness of the Maneki-neko, depicting the good luck calico cat crushing an anatomically accurate heart with its upraised paw. Blood splatters and drips from the ripped-out heart with aggressive force in a ridiculous display of schlock horror encoded with film references ranging from ‘Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom’, to the wry violence of Tarantino and the nail-biting intensity of classic 80s slashers. Romeo takes this brutality to a mischievously morbid extreme with the title Rip Dip Alert, injecting the painting with a grimly animated element that mirrors the iconic swing of the Maneki-neko’s paw. With his dark eye for gallows humour, Romeo straddles the line between the playful and macabre by transforming ‘Happy Meow’ into ‘Happy Now’, a perversely cute phrase that stands in contrast to the cat’s savagery. The commissioned painting is a brilliant realization of the client’s request to combine literal and metaphoric elements into a richly layered piece that recites a chapter of a story yet to be fully told. Daring and deadly in equal measure, Rip Dip Alert is a pulse-pounding slice of Kitsch Pop that stands out in Romeo’s repertoire of boundary-pushing commissions.