notes and notices are short and curt reviews of exhibitions at (mostly) London galleries.
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.
Are gays okay? The question’s rhetorical, of course. Debut’s installation chases orgiastic exuberance to stave off the realisation that the carnival is long over. A pile of used men’s underwear — collected, one imagines, from a mere month’s worth of sexual encounters — hangs off laundry racks as if in a fetish club. An emoji-like graphic arrangement shows what the garb’s owners may get up to were they assembled within penetrating distance. Mechanical club beats blast on repeat, sustaining this cycle without reprieve.
Until 6pm, that is, when the gallery closes. Debut and his lovers spend their nights sleepless, imagining the courage to snap out of this cycle. They admit this much, wrongly believing this confession alone might save them. Pity, then, that they can’t make art out of it.
It’s unsettling for a critic when an artist who made his name pursuing mostly bad ideas does something different and altogether better. Is the departure a fluke, a new direction, or does it recast the earlier practice, thus demanding a reappraisal of earlier disappointments?
Sahib is known for his fetishist indulgence in identity. If this new work stems from the same interests, it is only opaquely. In the gallery’s darkened spaces, a deformed shadow of a stray dog traverses the otherwise empty floor. The animal moves erratically, its limbs distorted by the vantage of the overhead camera, reminiscent of the technical imagery of police helicopter chases.
This spectral appearance, set to a low hum soundtrack, is eerie, as if the canine’s sorry end was already a foregone conclusion. One can’t help but wish for it, too: animal pity turns into animal cruelty, and bang, the mutt’s a goner. Is this the catastrophic link to Sahib’s earlier gay and British-Asian preoccupations?
In this atmosphere, his Horizon paintings — postcard-sized acrylic tableaux fashioned after LED video displays — are an intriguing but unnecessary reprieve in a predictable aesthetic. His terrible poems, on the other hand, make one wish Sahib had stuck to works about leather bars and poppers.
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.
Inspired in form and attitude by Manhattan Art Review.
