Firelei Báez

A Midnight's Dream

★☆☆☆☆

On until 8 September 2024

It’s hard to treat an exhibition this banal at anything other than face value. Báez paints semi-abstract, vaguely figurative objects inspired by the garden and the seashore. The products of such “inspiration” often end up at street stalls in tourist hotspots. Inexplicably, her oeuvre commanded the confidence of nearly a dozen of SLG’s work-experience curators.

A female figure reads Ben Okri in one of Báez’s tableaux. What hell, it’s warm outside! Other cutout personas blend into the topiary in kaleidoscopic, carnivalesque poses. They assault the senses with all the rainbow’s colours at once. The gallery’s main hall, meanwhile, became a fishing village. It is deserted save for a light ornament, as though in anticipation of some festivity. A blue cloth dropped from the ceiling is punctured with holes more densely than the Caribbean sky is with stars.

Judging by the prominently displayed promotional video, peddling tat to unsuspecting punters is what SLG trains its “fellows” in. Even the contextual references to decoloniality or claims of the installation’s immersive nature are as half-hearted as the work itself. Such kitsch might have been fine in a spinster auntie’s bedroom. In the gallery, it is a cruel trick to play on Londoners stuck in the city all summer.


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

transfeminisms Chapter IV at Mimosa House ★☆☆☆☆

transfeminisms Chapter IV: Care and Kinship

★☆☆☆☆

Lack of care for the artefact is a strange USP for a gallery.

Botond Keresztesi, NPC (No-one Paints Chrysopoeia) at Seventeen ★★★☆☆

Botond Keresztesi

NPC (No-one Paints Chrysopoeia)

★★★☆☆

There is no “too much” in this fantasy meme game.

Some May Work as Symbols at Raven Row ★★★★☆

Some May Work as Symbols: Art Made in Brazil, 1950s–70s

★★★★☆

Art history can catch modernity in splitting from the past and thus from itself.

Urs Fischer, Scratch & Sniff at Sadie Coles ★★★☆☆

Urs Fischer

Scratch & Sniff

★★★☆☆

It’s too early for a funeral, yet there’s no other reprieve in this commodity cult.

Slawn at Saatchi Yates ★★☆☆☆

Slawn

★★☆☆☆

Do you like KAWS but find him too expensive?

Nikita Gale, Blur Ballad at Emalin ★★☆☆☆

Nikita Gale

Blur Ballad

★★☆☆☆

Even though the show brings together a few unusual tricks, they are disjointed and leave little for the eye to linger on.

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