Michael Andrew Page

Claustrum

★★★★☆

On until 17 February 2024

When e-flux adds #neurodivergent to the tags they use to big-data all art, Page’s paintings are sure to make the top of the set. His linen oils, as repetitious as they are meticulously executed, point to a preoccupation that few minds sustain. In granular but confusing detail, each explodes a grand structure. 

The arches, columns, and domes – half implied, half drawn in near one-to-one scale – could be the features of a cathedral. CAD, image transfers, and meditation all leave marks on these diagrams. The show’s titles then turn these monuments and their much poorer, windswept cousins into defenders of life’s frailty. Finally, they become the structures of life itself.

All this is pleasing to look at for an #actuallyautistic mind until it remembers that Page’s tent, brain, and the cathedral take the same form for a pretty good reason. To share in this discovery is the purpose of art.


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

Zyad Menk: Scar Tissue at Ginny on Frederick ★★☆☆☆

Zyad Menk

Scar Tissue

★★☆☆☆

History’s scrapheap with no interpretative powers.

I’m so gay for you at Miłość ★★☆☆☆

I'm so gay for you

★★☆☆☆

This “celebration of queerness” is no orgy

Ed Webb-Ingall, A Bedroom for Everyone at PEER ★☆☆☆☆

Ed Webb-Ingall

A Bedroom for Everyone

★☆☆☆☆

How can art improve the lives of communities? Wrong answers only.

Șerban Savu, The Romanian Pavilion in Venice ★★★★☆

Șerban Savu

What Work Is

★★★★☆

This Elysium is part panel house block, half Roman ruin

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.

Stephen Willats, Time Tumbler at Victoria Miro

Stephen Willats

Time Tumbler

★★★★☆

Willats orders fragments of time, matter, and space into data packets on one side of the flow chart and puts them to use on the other.

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