notes and notices are short and curt reviews of exhibitions at (mostly) London galleries.
We were once capable of distinguishing between categories. A history painting was distinct from an illustration on a chocolate tin and it had no more than a passing acquaintance with the illuminated book frontispiece.
In a world of seamlessly fused aesthetics, this is the case no longer. Nishimura’s oils and temperas could make a claim on any number of traditions. Yet they belong to none that warrants an export licence. His needlessly oversized illustrations on linen, rendered in a twee “young adult” style, project suburban Japanese lives. Smaller works attempt a “Richter for otakus” mood that barely rises to a meme. What genre, old or new, these brush strokes belong to seems moot.
In London, such subjects and objects cry for context. Nishimura’s thin paint layers afford them too little, the whole show failing to fall into a viable category. Such dislocation was once the stuff of excitement. Today, it barely reflects its own homelessness.
Burroughs was right: language is a virus. Its hold over the imagination is total, its grip on the mind consuming. The only way for an artist — a creature whose sole comfort lies in the image — to free herself from it is to turn its excess into an exorcism.
It’s repetition, stuff, and nonsense, then, while each word alone claims autonomy next to the other. Write, write on, write again. Bart Simpson, who starts each episode of his life copying out phrases onto a blackboard, knows this only too well. Horn follows him — her writing instrument as blunt, her paper blackboards cartoonish — scrawling of her “paralysis” and “hope” many times over.
Far too many, in fact, for anyone to believe that she believes in either. No word can express how this story ends, however. To ask is to concede that the virus already won.
One has to pity Anish Kapoor. He’s spent a lifetime pursuing an alchemy of voids. He’s hung tonnes of steel from ceilings that cry for reinforcement, becoming in so doing beholden to steel magnates. He’s dreamt of cutting through mountain ridges. He’s polished mirrors until they gave him the squint, placing him solo in the centre of his creation.
Many of the sculptor’s grandest proposals don’t get beyond the maquette, however, and with good reason. This Hayward salvo is one such dead end IRL. Kapoor’s forms seem here restrained by visitor capacity concerns. Their profound substance, if any, hides in a glibly colour-coordinated Instagram aesthetic.
Fibreglass mountains hang from the ceiling, lacerations and outgrowths mark canvases and pedestals. Polished steel and Vanta black abound. Yet nothing here overwhelms the senses. Is this the abyss Kapoor dreams we dream of? If so, pity the artist: Kaspar David Friedrich got to it in a single canvas.
Bam’s clay forms project a whimsical freedom that one may well envy. Her ceramic tubes, their girth inviting a warm embrace, stand defiantly, yet comically tall, even though they only barely resist collapse under their own weight. The weaker they are, too, the more their maker expects of them. Bam charges a set of these overgrown pot plants, unglazed and only partly fired, with the weight of the world. With pulley and rope, she promises them reprieve form gravity.
But all this is woo. Rope only adds weight to the assembly, and it’s Bam who takes the illusory liberties for granted. Her experiments with pigment and granularity lack intent; she falls prey to their babble. An installation of soil and a riverscape video, aesthetically so juvenile it’s embarrassing, betrays the motivated, faux naïveté of the lot.
Until not long ago, our view of the cosmos hinged on the indivisibility of the atom. Overnight, this certainty crumbled to account for this atom’s now inexhaustible changeability. Winters’ canvases, made up in the manner of the petri dish and the planetary system, attest to both, turning time’s axis into a measure of distance.
Oblate cross sections take shape as the painter slices through matter. His images dwell in extreme microscopy, their primary colours artefacts of extreme artifice. They capture life on chromosomal scale on one surface and in interference patterns on the next. Winters’ project is not, therefore, mere description. A creationist science, if such a thing were possible, is born out of oil.
It might be amusing to suggest that the line between abstraction and affectation is fine, but that’s quite literally the case in Rouy’s quasi-figurative paintings. His group oil portraits, or, more accurately, mid-mortems of living bodies being exploded together, look for reprieve in sketchy overlays intended to confuse the viewer and the nature of things themselves.
Torsoso, buttocks, and limbs pile up together, but not too indiscernibly, one drawing too closely on the next. A lone charcoal gave rise to all this, we’re told, but it ran out of its representational payload before it reached the next canvas. Rouy’s figures are too studiously removed, their correspondence to a false original too neat. Even the works’ surface finishes — afterthoughts borrowed from Twombly and Richter — betray timidity when faced with their own image.
Elena Njoabuzia Onwochei-GarciaGrown: The Altering of Innocence and Experience
★★★★☆William Hine, LondonOn until 25 July 2026Onwechi-Garcia’s hangings turn the gallery into a night-in-the-museum dream sequence. Her teal pastels and watercolours animate centuries of myth, mixing chronology and provenance. There’s a lifted Blake and maybe a Hogarth, and a paraphrased Goya. A broken Greek vase could be a source here, and that medieval illumination must have taken reverie to copy. These large, floating drawings, having refused their customary framings, break out in storied, fragile opulence.
Such fables are pure pleasure to narrate, yet their wealth of references overwhelms. Does the artist care for the history she dwells in, or does her maze confirm civilisation’s loss inside it? It’s hard to discern this from Onwechi-Garcia’s hand alone. Some of her characters take on a life of their own, others are stilted and composed a little too tightly. A set of Freudian slips —steel snakes, get it? — confuse transmission and fantasy emission.
It’s staggering that we ever believed galleries might be effective loci for social campaigning. The production of art lags so far behind theory, which, in turn, only slowly distorts political need, that by the time an exhibition speaks to the “poetics and aesthetics of illness”, its only language is cliché.
Whom does it help to find a secondary Felix Gonzalez-Torres (poetic, check) and hang it next to a tertiary Derek Jarman (crassly aesthetic, thumbs down)? These narratives were once productive but gave way to self-sabotage and self-pity. Avril Corron’s IV-bag water chandelier blames her landlord for something, while Bella Milroy’s welfare letters are no Daniel Blake when health claims have sunk the economy.
The social model of disability is that to be unwell is other people’s problem. In projects like this one, it takes on the Romantic notion that consumption makes the artist a truth-seer. A few works resist this: Angela de la Cruz’s sofa and wooden box assembly is art before it is anything else and even Christine Sun Kim has earned her place in the inaudible canon.
But to mix such work with the pseudo therapeutic, pseudo activist babble of the Freestylers is a put-on. The striking academics next door also ask for sympathy because their future “NHS therapists are training here”.
It takes hutzpah to put a row of steel shelves in a fifteenth-century Venetian library, stack them with a bunch of decommissioned library books, and call the job complete. It is another thing altogether that more than half a dozen institutions over a dozen years have joined in Favaretto’s antiquarian act.
The art world art sees its preservation and reproduction in these “Momentary Monuments”. With literacy itself in ostensible crisis, Favareretto’s second-hand salesmanship exposes the museum’s anxiety that the image might soon go the way of the word. Imagine the Louvre a charity shop, then, with Rembrandt and Rothko in the bargain bin, Warhol the stock boy, and Duchamp in the toilet where he always belonged.
Whose expense is this joke at? On redundant paper, Favaretto’s concerns are loftier yet more trite. The pamphlet speaks of “the book as an epistemic infrastructure” and “a critical space for verification and transmission”. Burning the art student’s undergraduate essays won’t solve the problem, alas. Neither will the conceptualist’s iconoclasm.
Alexander Kluge et al.The Ear is the Eye of the Soul
★★★☆☆Holy See pavilion, VeniceCurated by Hans Ulrich Obrist, Ben VickersOn until 22 November 2026Don’t too many priests spoil the soup? The Vatican’s two-curator, two-site, countless-artist pavilion tries to please crowds in the garden and confuses them in the sacristy. The sonic walk installation, with works by Obristian sidekicks cued up to the heavens, is outright trivial. It’s pleasant, granted, to stroll through Venice’s one patch of secluded greenery, but that’d be the case even without wireless headphones. This installation could happen (and has) anywhere; the holy soundtrack’s transcendental pathos is, in this end, entirely generic.
Across the city, Kluge’s dying confession to Hildegard of Bingen is spectacular but by contrast too heavenly to dwell in. Architectural reconstruction hardware, drapery, and sickly yellow lighting turn the church complex into a site of renewal. In it, twelve filmic stations bear the sound of nuns singing, musicological trivia, and interruptions in… Comic Sans. What they narrate God only knows, though. In vain, one waits for this Medieval sonic payload to trump its contemporary counterpart.
Inspired in form and attitude by Manhattan Art Review.
