notes and notices are short and curt reviews of exhibitions at (mostly) London galleries.
Patricia FergusonEach Little Scar
★★★★☆FILET, LondonCurated by Brenna HorroxOn until 6 October 2024No medium is better suited to anxiety and dread than the menacing dark line of the copperplate print. The late Ferguson’s 1980s graphic and charcoal works trace life in Northern Ireland at the height of the Troubles. Fear and loss left deep scratches in the faces of the women and children whom these works catch in moments of great trepidation. In one, a knock on the door wakes up a mother’s basest of instincts. In another, a liberatory political banner is a deadly trap.
“There is a gun in her home, and she is afraid”, marks a print titled Ireland. There is no defiance here, and no resolution in peace, either. Ferguson’s later works veered into media abstraction. Three sizeable plates of copper scoured seemingly at random and bearing signs of rust are hard to view through the gallery’s window. This isn’t on purpose, but it gives the show respite.
Elsewhere, the display reveals an anxiety over the status of prints as worthy art objects. A bizarre contraption of steel and distressed wood inspired by Ferguson’s subjects serves as a counter for her smaller coppers. It needlessly compensates for a deficiency not manifest in the work.
If this installation were a film pitch for Wong Kar Wai – and it’s hard to imagine that it’s anything but – it would end up in development hell. Pencils and oils barely cover the surface of the plywood panels on which Phatsimo Suntstrom set out her storyboard. The genre is ‘noir’, and the twist that the sinister protagonist is female.
No gasps so far. With the right lighting, this story could be a mid-century colonial classic. Phatsimo Suntstrom doesn’t deliver. Yet, even the paintings’ faux sentimentalism could be forgivable in a skilful edit. Less so is the painter’s timid decision to commission an elaborate stage set made from her trademark plywood. The Curve could be the villa from Robbe-Grillet, but it isn’t. In the final print, neither actor takes the spotlight, and neither deserves it.
If selling art relies on telling the artist’s mythos, this gallery has struck gold with the estate of the seabed crawler Maniatakos. The man was an acclaimed artisan and amateur sculptor of marble extracted from his home island of Tinos. That alone could earn him a footnote in art history and be enough to turn his archive of “sculptures, photography, and a boat” into an art fair presentation.
But, bingo, Maniatakos was also a marketable eccentric who spent his summers diving to the ocean floor with a breathing apparatus and waterproof canvas, both of his own invention. These trips gave rise to a murky, textured chronicle of paintings that bear more resemblance to Etel Adnan landscapes than the sun-kissed idyll postcard a tourist may associate with the Greek island coast.
These pictures are not abstracts, but their surfaces recorded waves alongside the artist’s vantage. One renders the other only half-legible. Examining the paintings in the gallery’s bright lights doesn’t lift their mystery, either. The gallery’s press release, however, follows the tide blindly.
Despite their formal simplicity, Åhlander’s photographs can build an atmosphere. It’s late summer at the family’s lake holiday cottage. The sun shines through the curtains, the building creaks in the breeze, and lunch will be ready soon. Together with the gallery’s fit-out – of brass trimmings, dark carpet, mirrors – the illusion is as good as complete.
Then Amar Bhamr’s art handler’s readymade breaks it, hard, revealing the whole scene to be make-believe. But not before this artist, too, litters the floor with traces of the season’s turn, thus showing himself to be as sentimental as the rest of us.
“Choose one idea and stick with it no matter what” was decent advice for an artist until a couple of decades ago. Dahlgren took this to heart and spent his career rearranging stripes of colour with a dedication that would put Daniel Buren to shame. He has produced stripy prints, sculptures, videos, and photographs. He has even staged a series of colour protests filled with placards designed to his colour scheme. He probably makes his own t-shirts which, of course, are always striped.
I met Dahlgren in his studio over a decade ago and even then wondered how and if his practice might develop. It seems that it hasn’t. But should it? In this anxiously posed show, the works are older than the artist’s last good idea, and nothing strives for novelty not already synonymous with modernity. If only Dahlgren’s proposition was any more daring, disordered, or simply counterintuitive, the gallery might be spared waiting for his stripe to enter the canon.
To stage covert exhibitions in the City of London is an act of opportunistic resistance, or so declares the curator of this illegal pop-up in a bus drivers’ toilet. The respite from capitalism is temporary, however: each show lasts no more than three hours, and it’s bring-your-own booze. In the long lineage of galleries located in toilets, this one is more a hipster happening than an artistic challenge to anything.
Graham’s poor image photographic installation, composed of scuffed stock images of breakfast foods in cheap clip frames, is so unspectacular that it would be overlooked by a driver using the facilities in a hurry. It follows some more intrusive projects that in their Insta documentation brim with toilet humour that might get TfL’s cleaning crew the sack. The practice has earned the project an invitation to a boutique art fair all the same.
To do things without the institutions’ blessing is, by principle, better than doing nothing. By paying no attention to art, however, this project replicates the problem it wants to avoid.
Sosa JosephPennungal: Lives of women and girls
★★★★★David Zwirner, LondonOn until 28 September 2024Joseph’s portrayals of village rites have a touch of the supernatural about them. The pictures follow the order of things, however. In one, a group of women prepare food. Some girls make music while others play with yard animals. Next door, a couple have sex awkwardly so as to not wake their baby. In the most striking image, women attend to the lifeless pale body of a girl retrieved from the cold river on another canvas. The night, finally, recognises despair and witnesses infanticide.
The troubling quality of these paintings could have something to do with the colour palette of vivid yet washed-out greens, oranges, and purples which Joseph broadly deploys to make up her scenes of invasive shadow. An even greater discomfort, however, arises with the viewer understanding that the devastation which Joseph recorded in her native Kerala is merely obscured by the gallery’s modernity. The latter offers us villagers no comforts.
Keresztesi’s ornate paintings are taxing on the imagination. In one, mechanical horses meet crying cyborgs. In another, emotional factory robots wistfully look over a horizon on fire. That could be enough but there is no “too much” in this fantasy meme game. Next, gilded clowns laugh at the weather. Crystal castles crumble in the wind. Oh, and the gallery’s walls are turned into clouds.
Ironic Art Nouveau is Seventeen’s premium brand of opulence. Keresztesi doesn’t hold back when mixing it with early Deviantart forum sci-fi and traces of late Surrealism for good measure. He speaks of alchemy as he does so, albeit more obliquely than the gallery would have him. It is not easy to discern from the canvases alone whether this practice is borne of biological dystopia or a blind breed of techno-optimism. There is not quite enough paint on their surface to split this final difference.
Megan RooneyEchoes & Hours
★★☆☆☆Kettle's Yard, CambridgeCurated by Andrew Nairne, Amy TobinOn until 6 October 2024Can an exhibition be at once hubristic and timid? Rooney’s broad-stroke, bold colour abstract oils claim their space in the galleries without hesitation. A “family” of canvases on which the artist is said to have worked for a year makes a run for the prime spots under the skylights. They bear the crusty traces of a painterly battle: long lines applied at right angles as though in a feat of angry desperation. A mostly blue mural wraps another space from floor to ceiling, leaving the eye no respite. It merely magnifies the gestures from the smaller tableaux, as though the same artist now suffered from gigantism.
For all this bravado, Rooney’s compositions offer only a very surface experience of abstraction. Seen through a tight squint, her images pay lip service to Water Lilies or the Starry Night. But the artist knew that every abstract image ever made does the same just as well. Not even the gratuitous dance performance commissioned for the mural and shown in the exhibition as a video “activated” these paintings the way Rooney says in another film they deserve.
A wall built from Harlequin-patterned concrete blocks serves as the backdrop for a pile of black aluminium cans. They look like an out-of-scale González-Torres candy pile but lack any source of tension. Elsewhere, a structure that could make for a children’s climbing frame smoothly blends steel rebar with concrete. It is endearingly crude but somehow too easy to look at. One might want to touch or mount it, but the materials’ soft, steady surfaces dissuade. Even the traces of rust on the grid appear self-conscious and uninviting.
Rothschild has made assemblies of such material perfection, blended pastel gradients, and blemishless extrusions for many years. Her high-spec fabrication inspires desire. But without points of contrast, these sculptures are too clean, too ordered, and too clever for no good reason. This work is “resolved” far past the point of an ideal, saturating the senses and leaving nothing to the imagination.
Inspired in form and attitude by Manhattan Art Review.
