notes and notices are short and curt reviews of exhibitions at (mostly) London galleries.
This show could have been solid five-star material. But I only got to see it through the gallery’s window because the staff didn’t let me come in a quarter of an hour before their official preview even though the door was wide open. That’s for the best because what I did see – paintings of foliage familiar in style from Ikea wallpapers that the press release claims are metaphors for “colonisation and migration of bodies across the Atlantic” – deserved even less attention.
Florian MeisenbergWhat does the smoke know of the fire?★★★★☆Kate MacGarry, LondonOn until 21 October 2023Florian Meisenberg’s paintings are either the product of a conspiracy or documents of a conspiracy theory. Whichever it is, the secret is as old as the hills. The canvases are filled by a crude, naïve hand that matches their folk contents: aethereal beings, plants with magical powers, strange rituals, acts of submission and domination. And naked bodies. Lots of naked bodies.
These works know nothing and too much at the same time, always maintaining plausible deniability. Between the witch burning, group sex, and friendly foxes, they’d make equally good posters for The Q Anon Movie and covers for the Ramblers association annual report.
Because Meisenberg applies ground stone onto the canvases, they look like more colourful, fantasy versions of cave paintings. It’s been a while since overzealous boy scouts ‘accidentally’ destroyed prehistoric stone markings. That same end will eventually come for Meisenberg’s work, too: he even foretells it in a miniature video in which a camera lens pointing at the sun too long goes blind.
The wood and corrugated iron huts which Borrington built in the gallery from his grandmother’s memories of her Caribbean village look disconcertingly like art fair booths. The atmosphere is festive, the carnival is on. One hut is home to Bonnington’s sail-like paintings of sunsets and girls frolicking in the sea. Another, with ‘guest artist’ Paul Anthony Smith, shows collages of revellers and flags of pan-Caribbean unity. Sonia Gomes uses hers to hang a fabric sculpture. There’s also a ‘project’ room with Akinola Davies Jr.’s flickering images and sounds from Notting Hill.
Any one of these artists could have carried the show but together, they compete for grandma’s hospitality. The party slumps into a half-voiced political complaint and never recovers. This is what happens when instead of living culture, we ‘celebrate’ it, as is the demand of street carnivals and, indeed, art fairs.
A tall woman wearing Louboutin heels and a Givenchy suit, clutching a Fendi purse strides confidently through a museum. She gestures at the displays as she passes: this Stella, that Judd. A gaggle of faggy curators follow her adoringly. They Tweet out anonymous allegations of sexual abuse to #MeToo the male artists. Long live the feminine museum! Now she drops off her car at the mechanic’s shop, dressed down to Armani. Those Pirelli calendars must go, here’s some Playgirl instead. Women drivers rule!
The screenplay for ‘a day in the studio with Sylvie Fleury’ just writes itself. Sadly, she didn’t make the film but the props are all in the show. A counterfeit Pistoletto mirror has that woman bending over a Moschino shopping bag. Designer shoes are strewn across a fake Andre tile floor. And there’s Chanel nail varnish in the mechanic’s office for his buff mate to try on.
In Fleury’s car workshop cum womenswear boutique, everything is ready-made and ready-to-wear. But you can’t touch any of it and you certainly can’t afford it. This is feminism for trophy wives and capitalist critique for the 1%. So clean, so safe, so Swiss!
A woman’s self-portrait in sickly lime green and yellow acrylic spread so thinly that it looks like a felt-tip doodle. Tilson sports a cutesy beret and a checked trench coat. She turns her absent gaze out of the frame. The pattern of her coat matches the background like in Jacques Demy’s Umbrellas of Cherbourg, only less Technicolor. The next painting is the same, just with slightly different (sickly) colours. And the next one too. Tilson is in all of them. And in every one, she’s lost.
This line may perfectly ascribe Catherine Deneuve’s 2023 successor. But if The Umbrellas made the actress an instant star, Tilson’s styled self-portraits are an affectation that will take many years of practice to pay off.
Cui’s acrylics are what today’s megacities would look like if the characters of the 1960s cartoon The Jetsons had free reign over architecture. The skyscrapers are so tall that it would make no difference to a street-level observer to make them any taller. There is no sky anyhow and the structures have no Earthly foundations, either. There are stripes and checks on the canvas edge for scale, but they have no key. It’s a futuristic vision, except Abu Dhabi and Shanghai already built it.
But it’s the prehistoric Flintstones – the jet family’s contemporaries in the animation studio – that get the final word because ‘architectural’ models of giant animals dominate the canvases and the buildings. There’s a mega-giraffe, a skyscraper-sized rooster, a cathedral-like rabbit. Dino, the Flintstones’ pet dinosaur, must be close by too.
For all the liberties Cui takes with architectural conventions, this attempt to bring a simulacrum of the natural world together with the megapolis is unsustainable. The exhibition thus feels like a lecture on climate change sponsored by the designers of The Line, Saudi Arabia’s dystopian plan for a 110-mile linear city in the desert.
Pozi doesn’t want the figures in her umbrous acrylics to be recognised. Only one face is rendered at all. In one image, a woman hides in a room so cold and so dimly lit that she may well be the girl selling matches. In another scene that could be the end of a night out on an industrial estate at the edge of town, a different woman registers only in silhouette. Then there’s a group, but they’re as indistinct as the faces of Jesus that regularly appear to people on slices of toast.
These no-shows are plenty to worry about. But a sound and image montage installed in a tomb-like structure teases a downlow house party in which the absences are even more acute. This moves the exhibition from the understated sensibility reminiscent of Degas straight to Tumblr, where to be out of the loop is far more frustrating.
At the very first glance, Xie’s sizeable canvasses look like the kind of crass abstractions that routinely fill the walls of galleries in need of a cashflow injection. A moment later – and this says nothing of the work’s commercial allure – they reveal a clef, a code by which one finds that they are, in fact, portraits of figures lost between brushstrokes, renders, and planes.
Looking at these paintings is a little like wearing an augmented reality headset over only one eye: here is the figure, here is the artefact. This one is lost in a canvas within a canvas. Another one you only know from a laptop screen. That one is how you’ll dream when your data plan runs out.
There’s joy in geometry. To make his tableaux, Relph poked circular and rectangular holes in packaging cardboard he found in the alley behind a Manhattan Comme de Garçons store. He added to this some stickers and stencils and thus made the perfect wall decoration for a graphic designer’s dining room. But there’s little for the eye to hang on and none of the punk culture of Relph’s earlier practice emerges from the works. Is the clothing brand iconic or ironic? Why is the cardboard so clean? It would be more fun to play with a child’s wooden shapes toy – a close relative of these plates – than to figure this out.
A green mountainside, the white cliffs of Dover, an enchanted forest at night, a cat hiding behind the curtains. A small canvas with a dramatic seascape seen through a sash window has little fabric drapes pinned on it. A ceramic rendering of a human ear dangles over an oil stamped with a brick pattern as though to make a rebus. Teacups, shoe laces, and (of course) mushrooms stick out from other paintings.
Liddel mixes perspectives and scales and she tries to measure the permanence of mountains with the length of a cigarette. Her subjects want to be at once grand and mundane. But they aren’t. Add to this some abstractions with titles like Between Worlds and these are very mixed messages. When Liddel applies her material tricks to them indiscriminately, the result is the twee aesthetics native to a grandmother’s mantlepiece collection of tourist souvenirs and devotional figurines. That’s not a bad perspective, but the works neither elevate, nor challenge it.
Inspired in form and attitude by Manhattan Art Review.
