notes and notices are short and curt reviews of exhibitions at (mostly) London galleries.
Considering that this careful collection of sunny seascapes and villa vistas contains some of the twentieth century’s greatest hits, this Riviera review makes its art history look somewhat samey. Despite giving ample consideration to Cezanne and the Impressionists, Seurat and the Fauvists, Neo-Impressionists and Monet, the show’s opening rooms — stuffed with visitors like the paint points on a Signac — leave one longing for some profound, unspecified difference.
This feeling intensifies retrospectively, after Bonnard and a pivotal section that the show anachronistically labels “the 1920s”. Art history then finally gives way to Picasso’s beach antics, before — again disruptively and with insufficient narration — ending in de Staël and Klein’s blues.
Many of the pictures in this chronology are stunning, granted — even the here relatively minor output of Henri-Edmond Cross, André Derain, and Raoul Dufy earns attention — but the assembly’s myth-making legacy is puzzling. What base mimesis was at play at Cap Ferrat and Sanit-Tropez that has us on the hook still? What moral utility comes for the present from so venerating the stylistic minutiae of the French bourgeoisie? Answers, one assumes, lie in the disjuncture.
When Barthes proposed in 1980 that everyone depicted in a photograph was already dead, his words fell on deaf ears. A decade later, the image would be proof of raw life. The combination of rich colour and ostensible fidelity became available equally to artists, fashion photographers, scene documentarians, and civilians. It attested to the confidence and exuberance of the era.
Tate’s display of these pictures — mixed with the odd video, sculpture, or painting — is depressing, however, because that life is now over. Corinne Day’s snaps of moody teens on Soho sofas, which open the show, would be impossible to restage today without sparking some moral panic. David Sims’ portraits for The Face force woeful comparison with today’s anxious identity production. Elaine Constantine’s rave snaps are unimaginable without the music.
Yet this death was not merely a matter of time: not all of us ’90s starlets suffered a life overdose. It is the institution that forces this collective passing, undermining even the basis for the generation’s mourning. Cool Britannia’s optimism was bogus, one wall text suggests (never mind that recollections vary), too much space goes to Hamad Butt’s AIDS installation (which the crowd ignores in favour of the Chapmans’ body horror), and black artists (drawn from then two per cent of the population) are the only ones left standing.
In comfort to vitalist, the exhibition’s narrative reliance on fashion — which transparently exploits near-death for profit — proves that its thesis is bunk.
How should we judge the aesthetic products of art therapy? What if, as it must, the art fails to heal?
Hubbard’s black-and-white photographs document her time with her ageing mother, who suffers from degenerative brain disease. The pictures fall in a nostalgic register: skilful exposure, tasteful framing, mirrors and props staged in tableaux. The two women appear in some of the images, playing artful hide-and-seek in one, as artful nudes in another.
Behind these studies — displayed on wooden struts that could have held drywall partitions — hangs a smaller number of contact prints made directly with the women’s bodies. These abstracts destabilise the other compositions, yet not fully.
Hubbard’s game remains a game, and it can be no other way. The artist starts as a therapist; the line between her and her mother-patient blurs. That would be fine — touching even — but the gallery overplays its hand (not least by pairing Hubbard’s show with an indulgent art therapy display) and thus gives this work no fair hearing.
The paintings of the late Colombian Emma Reyes — abstracts of lines, spots, and colours that only occasionally amount to nature or the human — are remarkable for the cultural confusion they induce decades, if not centuries, after their making. The bright acrylics of the 1990s, for example, borrow from only loosely defined, pre-Modern pictorial traditions of South America. Such mark making today reads as “indigenous”, but whom that indigeneity belongs to is not obvious.
Reyes’s project may have been one of reclamation; today’s viewer owes it no aesthetic allegiance. To an untrained eye, these “borrowings” could plausibly come from pre-colonial Australia or — where Reyes overtly asserts her skill — the Europe of Arcimboldo. In other words, everywhere.
Dwelling in pictorial simplicity that we must take to be universal, Reyes’s designs pull the rug from under claims of foundational cultural difference on which they rely when seen out of context. To recognise Reyes’s paintings as images at all is thus to pursue the picture’s most primordial form.
The art market is a perversion of trade. That today’s artists routinely oppose “capitalism” but crave a moral carve-out for the circulation of their work only proves this. We believe the problem itself to be art, even when nobody highlights it explicitly.
Tweddle, who obsessively painted dollar signs into his quasi-pop, quasi-psychedelic canvases trimmed to non-commodity shapes, was an example of such projected dissent eating itself. Labelled an “outsider”, he banked a show at MoMA and landed in the collection of the MET.
His cartoonish oils and acrylics have a charm to them, granted. Their quintessentially American atmosphere — big agriculture, trucking, the sexuality and industry mixing in the landscape itself — is seductive, although not enough to call for continued investment when the returns are doubtful.
Pairing these sequences with Landy’s 1991 flower market stall — whose survival may well be the result of insider trading — is more poignant than the frame of a commercial gallery would normally allow for. Nothing here disrupts the market, freeing the eye from the wallet.
Felicity PowellThe Studio of Felicity Powell
★★☆☆☆Richard Saltoun , LondonOn until 3 October 2026To posthumously make myth of an artist risks bathos. Powell, who died in 2015, left just enough worthwhile sculpture and drawing behind to assemble a minor museum display. To turn her unassuming bronze, glass, and marble pieces — body parts, stones, celebratory medals — into a gallery show that’d make her name again requires a gimmick.
This “studio” display, which tricks the viewer into seeing more than is offers, leverages the anachronism already present in Powell’s practice. Despite making work for public circulation at the turn of the millennium, Powell operated in registers that code her decades earlier. Spectres of Surrealism are overt and a mix of ephemerality and longevity lands poignantly next to the maker’s “untimely death” flagged in the show’s introduction.
How much of this is warranted and how much merely a reflex of “women’s art”? Powell was a medallist, yet not a medal recipient. Her studio is no cause for rerunning the competition.
McCaffrey’s paintings of imagined European interiors decorated with imagined European art are the perfect postcards of an American mind for whom everything is ‘content’. The artist peppers his void copies of Regency interior designs with signifiers, also void, of what the originals may have once played host to. Early Renaissance is his favourite: van Eyck’s round mirrors abound, for example, yet the Arnolfini are missing.
The result fails to distinguish between the frame and what’s inside it. Frameless themselves, the paintings only encapsulate how McCaffrey’s native US — forever a colony — still understands “Europe” and its cultural hinterland. Can Europe still tell the difference?
Elisa Giardina PapaShe Flickered In and Out of History
★★☆☆☆ICA , LondonOn until 6 September 2026It was once fashionable for an artist to live and work between one place and another. Giardina Papa still does. This may be why she feels affinity with a volcanic island that once appeared from the seabed between Sicily in Tunisia.
She tells the rock’s story in explosive, ultra-saturated video, stylistically advancing that dizzying 2006 Bravia television advert in which bursts of colour overwhelmed matter itself. Elsewhere, Giardina Papa scatters equally rich blue volcanic glass, fashioned into tongues and industrial bulk in wall cavities and on rubber mats.
The film’s poem lyricises sovereignty, condemns territorial claims, and confuses Odysseus, without undoing the installation’s technical sterility. Lifeless forms borne out of fire become models for liberation, the autonomy of literally and figuratively nowhere is this promo clip’s undesirable object.
Volcanoes erupt under water often, granted, but — no man is an island and all that — their formations are equally often short-lived. That Mediterranean Island sank months after it emerged, and the Glasgow tower block from Sony was demolished. Giardina Papa’s story renders transhumanist dreams more sharply than many similar artefacts. Their anchorless freedom, alas, is imaginable only in uninhabitable abstract.
Piling up tonnes of junk in the corner of a gallery is an old trick. This showroom is tiny, its corners everywhere, and Menk’s collection of electronic circuit boards, wires, and half-broken peripherals thus looks almost as impressive here as Christoph Büchel’s equivalent once did in a warehouse.
But volume alone is trivial, each item in this mess offering less to the eye than the last. Menk knows this: he used most of this matter before. Not always to such “rubbish” effect, either: e-waste was a game of research for him only three years ago.
For an artist so young, Menk’s electronics are very old news in the age of the chip implant and cloud computing. This could be intriguing but, in this rendering, isn’t. The form-factor turn on history’s scrapheap offers no interpretative powers.
Yvonne Mabs FrancisBreakdown
★★☆☆☆Yamamoto Keiko Rochaix , LondonCurated by Carol MaundOn until 6 August 2026Does an artist get to participate in the construction of her outsider status? Francis’s oils, sent up to London by her Oxfordshire estate just in time to coincide with Tate’s Kahlo “mania”, reflect on the painter’s confinement in a mental health hospital following a breakdown. These studiously executed self-portraits in anguish are inflected with heavy doses of surrealism, its sources anachronistic and purpose unclear. Francis communes with death on one canvas, with spirits and fairytales on another. These compositions show no sign of the peril a breakdown might involve.
Banally chosen fragments of biography reveal that the painter’s method was spurious: it’s not madness that gave rise to these paintings but a decade’s distance and planning. Kahlo inspired no end of copyists, as Tate vacuously reminds us. But a set of pencil drawings, which Francis made even later, brims with the unfeeling precision of facsimile. Even her titles, one puzzlingly borrowed from Hirst, suggest her mythmaking was deliberate. It is no excuse that this oeuvre found an audience (such as it is) only too late for her to share in the spoils.
Inspired in form and attitude by Manhattan Art Review.
