notes and notices are short and curt reviews of exhibitions at (mostly) London galleries.
By pursuing ideologically unassuming programming, Modern Art has had quite a run of excellent shows this past year. It would be unfair, however, to question the method on Simpson’s canvasses because his habit of rendering life’s dimensional interstices – doors, ladders, and chimneys – as perspectival projections developed decades before he joined Stuart Shave’s stable.
The images, some nearly as expansive as the gallery’s walls, set out simple scenes. Fragments of architecture – like a quaint library console that could have come from Arne Jacobsen’s Brutalist design for Oxford’s St Catherine’s College – appear in technical detail in some. In others, they resonate with the graphic character of advertising or agit-prop and become scenes of sin, confession, and reparation. In this meditation of surface disguised as a study of objects, however, neither is a truer likeness of the events which Simpson deftly omits from his canvases.
Since the 2020 US racial reckoning, curators and critics in the UK have unthinkingly imported American tensions only to confound England’s already fragile interplay of class and ethnicity. The political value of such activism is still to be seen. Its aesthetic effects, however, have been devastating on both sides of the Atlantic.
The London exhibition of the New Orleans painter Auudi Dorsey’s portraits of his black, working-class neighbours could signal the turning in this morose trend. His works show a female parking attendant who chews gum as she writes a ticket, two restaurant chefs on break from the kitchen, an off-duty construction worker, and a middle-aged angler with his implausibly large catch.
Dorsey’s acrylics brim with dignity. The subjects’ faces betray signs of daily fatigue, but their stance is secure. That the canvases are rendered in sombre blue and green hues, as in a dark cop drama, is the one clue that other narratives could fit in these lives. Even the curator’s essay barely points to the reductive race-first reading of what is already evident by the artist’s hand. This leaves Dorsey to record the human experience with the true universalism of paint.
Anyone intrigued by Philip Guston’s oeuvre but deterred by Tate’s £20 tickets could do worse than Co Westerik as a consolation prize. Many of this Dutch Realist painter’s canvases made between the 1970s and his death in 2018 share the American’s fondness for wrinkled lines, heavenly interventions, and a pallet of social unease.
Westerik catches his figures in deep contemplation in front of the mirror, in the gynaecologist’s chair, or even mid-orgy. They look innocent but each has much to answer for. The show thus builds an industry of judgment and guilt and, unlike Guston’s whose redemption narrative was crowbarred in by circumstance, damns the viewer along with the painter.
Meeson Jessica PaeSecretions & Formations
Secretions & Formations
Secretions & Formations
★★★★☆Carl Kostyál, LondonOn until 13 January 2024If the hospital played host to an artist-in-residence programme, Pae’s paintings would be of great use in the staff training room and the consultant’s office. But her arrangements of arteries, glands, and other bodily organs that fill half a dozen intensely crimson canvases have no respect for anatomy. Bloodstreams become spaceports, the large intestine the site of a battle.
Oil paint can cause cancer. A surgery of galactic scale sliced through these forms, leaving their tendrils hanging in mucous-filled cavities. Despite this, a boundless life force orients these pictures. What they suffer in eek-factor, they overcome with sheer metabolic desire.
Robert RymanLine
Line
Line
★★★☆☆David Zwirner, LondonCurated by Dieter SchwarzOn until 13 January 2024Ryman’s delicate drawings are tentative attempts to settle in a lasting frame of reference. With the methodical zeal of a search and rescue pilot, the artist scored sheets of paper, coffee filters, and aluminium panels with girds and orientation marks in the hope that he may eventually understand the territory. Some of these nearly monochromatic frames, each barely a square foot, are maps of the forest, others of fog, others still of time past.
But when Ryman’s gestures grow in confidence, switching from pencil to black marker ink, for example, they inadvertently reveal their mounting desperation. The artist’s signature becomes a distress call and not even the horizon line helps the escape.
Pauline Boty was half pop artist, half actress, and in her mythology half pin-up it girl. The swinging ’60s would have been the perfect time for someone of Boty’s charisma to make a career of three halves. But she died young barely a decade into her practice, leaving a legacy of painting, collage, stained glass, and TV drama for speculation.
Although Boty was posthumously quite the rage in Poland’s soc-realist ’80s, it wasn’t until the again roaring ’90s that interest in her surviving oeuvre hit the UK art scene. Gazeli’s modest exhibition now brings a handful of Boty’s works – somewhat chaotic paper and gouache collages and oil paintings that could have been collages too – together with archives and tributes.
This mixes the woman and her legend, but without the air of mystery the artist enjoyed during her lifetime. Today, when a creator’s presence in their work is subject to TikTok’s terms of service, Boty’s multiple faces are challenging. She poses seductively on the cover of Men Only and in Michael Ward’s photographs, she lifts her dress for the camera. Such emancipation may have been a strategy for Pop art’s leading female founder. Today, its prompts aesthetic suspicion.
Elli Antoniou, Ali Glover, Richard Dean Hughesthings fall apart; the centre cannot hold
things fall apart; the centre cannot hold
things fall apart; the centre cannot hold
★★★★☆Tabula Rasa, LondonCurated by Kollektiv CollectiveOn until 26 January 2024Despite this gallery’s modest size, it takes more than a moment to note that one is in an exhibition. This is only partly because the space is also a bookshop: Ali Glover turned the showroom interior walls inside out. This gesture makes for a peculiarly sterile building site and an adventure playground for two others.
Elli Antoniou’s drawings in metal rendered on steel panels with the aid of an angle grinder are thrillingly disorientating. The internal reflections of these slivery surfaces defy the picture plane. One blink of the eye reveals barbed wire and a planetary system. A second gives way to a whole new cosmos.
Echoing this doubt, Richard Dean Hughes’ resin cast bedding is half NHS waiting room, half luxury Egyptian cotton. Beads of glass strewn across these forms point to some dramatic fracture while sheets of newspaper suggest that it is long in the past.
These works could bear witness to the birth of a star or the heat death of the universe. The curators, sadly, don’t want to know which. This sends Glover to Sisyphean toil while letting Antoniou and Hughes chase myths of their own making.
Christine Ay TjoeLesser Numerator
Lesser Numerator
Lesser Numerator
★★☆☆☆White Cube, LondonOn until 13 January 2024Aj Tjoe’s paintings could make great scenic backdrops to a David Attenborough documentary on the life of wild rodents or an episode of The Human Body. Each of the canvases, only lightly primed and rendered in a restricted palette, looks inside what could be a rat’s warren in winter or the cavity between the human heart and the lungs.
The show hopes to run multiple seasons and the painter made nearly a dozen of these images, one only slightly different from the last. But these paintings show no story and no evolution. Such pseudo-anatomical sketches can only hope to make set dressing for the tense psychological drama that Aj Tjoe would rather have us watch.
Pope.L’s fanciful etymology of ‘hospital’ as ‘stranger’ is only one of this show’s missed metaphors. The centrepiece is a crumbling scaffold on which the nearly naked artist ate the Wall Street Journal in 2000. Reading the Journal is said to increase a person’s wealth. It didn’t for Pope.L and there was no budget to test this thesis again today.
This monumental detritus confuses correlation with causation and forces accord with the now naïve staging of Wall Street as the main enemy. To make matters plainer still, the artist invites visitors to sprinkle “white stuff” onto his crumbling edifice, only to laugh behind their backs later.
The replication crisis continues in a 2008 video performance in which chickens and goats graze on and then topple the US Capitol building. This confounds the sources and forms of power and lands in the joke section of Animal Farm and not as a prophecy of the Jan 6th insurrection as the show guide would have it.
All this is as though the artist didn’t trust the audience to make meaning in his absence. The less performative parts of the exhibition – installations of wine bottles and hospital paraphernalia stained by decay – are free from this anxiety.
If more were more, DiMattio gets close to the limit. In her giant ceramics kiln, everyday motifs like sneakers and knickers clash into the ornate Rococo stove and the Victorian China snuff box. Bucolic scenes adorn wedding cakes, teapots and cake tins turn into totems. Cutesy flowers and seashells spread over floors, walls, and ceilings to near asphyxiation.
No wonder that each item leaves the oven crooked, as though assembled in a distorting brass mirror. This is the artist’s joke which she applies indiscriminately to the Greek orgy (literally) in one corner of the gallery and to the Amazon warehouse (yes) in the next. When she runs out of life’s surfaces to glaze, she lands safely in the one-liner of the Wedgwood mail-order collection.
This opulence has no reason other than DiMattio’s craft which, granted, isn’t nothing. But the elaborately decorative environment of wallpapers and floor mosaics into which the sculptures disappear is a gallery’s reminder that DiMattio’s commodity is available to order in any shape, colour, or size. Add mistletoe and tinsel and the lot would be at home in a department store’s Christmas display.
Inspired in form and attitude by Manhattan Art Review.
