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How is your day going?

★★☆☆☆

On until 19 October 2024

A small board smeared with a single stripe of dirty blue oil paint marks the beginning of Awuah-Darko’s diaristic series of geometric abstractions. The painter must have been experiencing despair on June 3, P.M. to start his show with such a singularly drab mark. His mood picked up a week later, however. June 17, P.M.’s tableau is one shade short of a rainbow, while July 4, P.M. is an outright firework display.

This project relies on layers of gimmicks and, sadly, they show through Awuah-Darko’s thick palette knife impasto. Despite the gallery’s promise, there is no trace of the artist’s moods in these images, nor his thoughts on the world around him. Instead, the oils celebrate the paint-by-numbers Excel spreadsheet that brought them into existence. Given that these works make a claim on Josef Albers’ coloured fields with which they share form and colour, this artifice is barely forgivable.

All art relies on a degree of narcissism. Even a classical landscape is an argument for one artist’s vision over another’s. Awuah-Darko, however, skips the painter’s travail altogether and demands the viewer’s attention for some already mediated ‘me’. 


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

Diego Marcon, Dolle at Sadie Coles HQ ★★★☆☆

Diego Marcon

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★★★☆☆

Idle work became indistinguishable from leisure, vegetative time-passing from family life.

Material Rites at Gathering ★★★☆☆

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Material Rites

★★★☆☆

The instincts are right, but too much makes sense to make sense together.

Erick Meyenberg, Nos marchábamos, regresábamos siempre, the Mexican pavilion in Venice ★☆☆☆☆

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Nos marchábamos, regresábamos siempre

★☆☆☆☆

Whatever the purpose of this confusion, it’s not to be found in the gallery.

Jordan Derrien, Painted on a Wall of the Inn at Marlotte at Des Bains ★★☆☆☆

Jordan Derrien

Painted on a Wall of the Inn at Marlotte

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Derrien has his audience discussing the nature of paint drying out loud.

The Poplar Bestiary at Tondo Cosmic ★★★☆☆

Tamsin Morse, Kris Lock, Casper Scarth, et al.

The Poplar Bestiary

★★★☆☆

This menagerie comes with no humanly comprehensible challenge.

Alia Farid, Elsewhere at Chisenhale ★★★☆☆

Alia Farid

Elsewhere

★★★☆☆

There is no answer in the work. Its cause and the object become enmeshed in a bland, exoticized mess. 

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