Christine Ay Tjoe

Lesser Numerator

★★☆☆☆

On until 13 January 2024

Aj Tjoe’s paintings could make great scenic backdrops to a David Attenborough documentary on the life of wild rodents or an episode of The Human Body. Each of the canvases, only lightly primed and rendered in a restricted palette, looks inside what could be a rat’s warren in winter or the cavity between the human heart and the lungs. 

The show hopes to run multiple seasons and the painter made nearly a dozen of these images, one only slightly different from the last. But these paintings show no story and no evolution. Such pseudo-anatomical sketches can only hope to make set dressing for the tense psychological drama that Aj Tjoe would rather have us watch.


notes and notices are short and curt exhibition reviews. Read more:

Oriol Vilanova: Los restos at the Spanish pavilion in Venice ★★★★☆

Oriol Vilanova

Los restos

★★★★☆

The dance of constellations that make up the Western civilisation inspires awe.

The Music is Black at V&A East ★★☆☆☆

The Music is Black: A British Story

★★☆☆☆

Can there be a “black British music” without Britain or blackness?

Özgür Kar, Heavy Ground at Emalin ★★★☆☆

Özgür Kar

Heavy Ground

★★★☆☆

Kar’s insight a fly’s life – or, to have it his way, the whole universe – is fleeting.

Yi To, Terminal Lucidity at Project Native Informant ★★★★☆

Yi To

Terminal Lucidity

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All evidence erodes eventually.

Auudi Dorsey at PM/AM ★★★★☆

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★★★★☆

Dorsey records the human experience with the true universalism of paint.

Helen Johnson, Opening at Pilar Corrias ★☆☆☆☆

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Opening

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This is the work of a mind that, having needlessly spent years in therapy, became hooked on ennui or of an artist who wasted time misreading Lacan.

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