notes and notices are short and curt reviews of exhibitions at (mostly) London galleries.
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’.
The ICA’s boxy gallery is a drab setting for Alkadhi’s sculptures formed from vast sheets of shipping tarps and covers. Tarred polyester canvases stretched on the horizon serve as heroic history paintings. Crumpled rolls of PVC oilcloth adorned with scrap steel and consumed by flame-red wounds occupy much of the floor space. They serve as 1:1 geological models of a land that bore them. A single fabric hanging conceals the invigilator’s seat. This petrochemical artefact betrays a sign of life as it moves with the fan’s oscillation. On closer inspection, however, the green leaves sprouting from it turn out to be plastic too.
The adjacent reading room gathers archival and fictional knowledge artefacts. Yellowed scientific journals, photographs, and documents from Iraq – the artist’s birthplace – hide their content in locked vitrines. They are implicitly discredited by their imperialist provenance. A parallel display, meanwhile, invites visitors to freely explore made-up stories of the Iraqi nation that had been heroically rebellious and succeeded against the colonial British force.
The thing is, it hadn’t. This archive’s insurgent life force is once again no more than a scrap of dummy plastic. Its shape more closely matches the institution’s explicit political aspirations than Alkadhi’s more sincere sculpture. When truth and artifice are so bluntly opposed, what use is aesthetics?
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.
Mohammed Z. RahmanA Flame is a Petal
★★★☆☆Phillida Reid, LondonOn until 13 July 2024Groups of young people gather in social rituals in Rahman’s cartoon paintings. Boys drink beers at a backyard barbecue. Others smoke cigarettes by a bonfire. The girls, elsewhere, eat dinner. Their overconfident adventures with fireworks make the quintessence of childhood.
The settings of their get-togethers, however, are only the figments of the painter’s imagination. So is their youthful cheer. Rahman finds his friends in deserts and war zones. To offer them reprieve from their horrors, he builds for them a series of stage sets that simulate the comforts of home.
Rahman’s zine hand makes this make-believe explicit but not plausible. Neither do the structures which frame his works in the gallery. His subjects’ stories – the most intriguing takes place in Mostar a decade after the city was besieged in the Bosnian war – are confused by the artist’s overstated, adolescent politics.
Matthew Barney’s work has few parallels in the contemporary art world. His films double down on Jodorowsky and his performances would put the young Abramović to shame. His bizarre installations challenge Beuys. A decade he spent working with Björk put his work in front of millions.
Secondary carries on with the artist’s trademark monumentality. It turns the gallery into an American Football stadium. Video screens hang from the ceiling to magnify the action for fans in the cheap seats. Barney’s game takes place only on those. Spectators shuffle around the Astroturf pitch, bumping into pillars and scaffold-like sculptures.
The hour-long video opera follows the athlete’s body in motion. The image mixes grace with industrial grit in a tone familiar from Barney’s River of Fundament cycle. The sport and stage costumes expand the artist’s study of physical restraint, the subject of his experiments already in the 1980s. The piece climaxes with the infamous 1978 pitch injury of the wide receiver Darryl Stingley which left the player paralysed.
The drawings and objects which accompany the film make Barney’s obsession with strength, elasticity, and brittleness of the human corpus explicit. The video’s installation enhances it, forcing all necks to crane uncomfortably. But it misjudges this warehouse gallery space. The objects’ proportions are at odds with the body’s grace to which they refer. All the seats in the house are the cheap seats, granted, but their discomfort is distracting, and the game lacks a cheerleader. This would be a trivial complaint in any other artist’s work, but for Barney, muscular fatigue must count for more.
For the simplicity of its conceptual gesture, Derrien’s series of wall paintings – quite literally fragments of canvas walls covered in what could be domestic paint and framed by white skirting boards – is riven with confusion. No detail is apparent in these works at first glance. Their modest scale and systematic, paired presentation demand close inspection.
The scrutiny yields reward. Subtle textural differences between the canvases emerge. One wonders if Derrien got his acrylics from Dulux and if he applied them with rollers rather than careful brushstrokes. Before long, the artist has his audience discussing the nature of paint drying out loud.
This is for nothing, however, because the artist forgot that his concept lies in its execution. His frames are shoddy, as though a cut-rate decorator assembled them to order. The wood mouldings are rickety, the canvas edges messy. This may have been intentional, but if so, Derrien’s work is no more than a poor copy of life and therefore redundant. If it’s an oversight, it discredits the whole genre.
Borremans’ anthropomorphic paintings distorted monkey faces have the appearance of porcelain dolls. Alone, they would have been unremarkable. Borremans, however, places these eerie animal portraits next to his only slightly odd pictures of humans. This does to the human figure what Pierre Huyghe’s ape did with the absence in his Human Mask film.
The comparison unnervingly accentuates his people’s outre-mer characteristics. Some seem medieval, others come from Hollywood Westerns. This company gives even an entirely straightforward female nude a set of otherworldly qualities that she alone could not bear.
Borrowings from 17th-century court portraiture mix with 1980s pop. Borremans toys with his subjects, his audience, and with art history. His monkeys quite literally do so with them all when they appear as giant overlords of human life modelled at plaything scale in the painter’s already modestly sized pictures.
There isn’t much new I expected to learn from a commercial excavation of an artist as thoroughly researched as the father of Neo-Dadaism Rauschenberg. This framing of his exhibition travels to cultural foes like Mexico, Venezuela, China, Japan, the Soviet Union, and East Germany in the 1980s, however, had me surprised. The project known as the Rauschenberg Overseas Culture Interchange and endearingly abbreviated to “Rocky” after the artist’s pet turtle outs Rauschenberg as a propagandist if not an outright Fed.
I happened to visit the gallery as one of its sales staff showered the work with adjectives for the benefit of a collector from one of these “alien but same” cultures. The American’s travel to politically “hostile” territories was “brave”. His wall assembly of Cuban cardboard boxes was “beautiful” and “profound” in a way only a child of American democracy could aspire to. That a visit to Tibet gave rise to a series of sculptures made of detritus was “remarkable”. Above all, Rauschenberg’s belief in the power of art to overcome division was “commendably unwavering”.
It is no secret that the CIA supported American Abstract Expressionism at the height of the Cold War. That celebrating art’s complicity with regime propagation decades later would be profitable will need a future historian to untangle.
Korine’s reputation precedes him. His cult legends like Kids and Trash Humpers are hard to eclipse. They have, however, earned him a place in both the indie canon and the art financiers’ chequebooks. This hasn’t always been to the work’s benefit. 2019’s Beach Bum shot in the style of Baywatch, for example, was thumbs-down dull.
Last year’s Aggro Dr1ft is a brutal story of “the world’s greatest assassin”. The violence of gunshots, car chases, and concealed identities certainly could make for a sleepless night. Shot in a psychedelic, infrared colour, this film might be Korine’s return to form.
None of this is of use to the gallery, however. A series of canvases reproduces the film’s most striking scenes with the finesse of an inexperienced but already blasé studio assistant. The garish colours which may have carried the story in cinema here are unfitting of their new medium. One or two do invoke the eeriness promised by the project’s synopsis, but this is through chance rather than artistic merit. To make matters worse, the exhibition includes a couple of video objects that loop the film’s sequences. These would be more appropriate for NFT drops if not bus-stop billboards.
Despite indications to the contrary, it brings this critic little pleasure to disparage the aspirations of a young gallery. But either the curator or the quinquagenarian artist should have known better than to show off this nonsense.
Ruscha’s paintings are a cross between a cartoonist’s representation of an LSD trip and an AI’s “artful” arrangement of twee California colours. They barely make up for their design with their thankfully modest size and number.
The gallery’s invitation promises Oskar Fischinger, Scott Bartlett, and even David Hockney. It is a blessing that it stopped short of citing Stella. Ruscha’s geometric repetitions, waves, and colour fields might be the thing in California’s forever hippie junkyard. In London, they are not Bardawil’s first investment into egregiously mediocre painting. This critic hopes they are the last.
Inspired in form and attitude by Manhattan Art Review.
