notes and notices are short and curt reviews of exhibitions at (mostly) London galleries.
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.
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.
Inspired in form and attitude by Manhattan Art Review.
