notes and notices are short and curt reviews of exhibitions at (mostly) London galleries.
Maiuri’s oil copies of found film stills and promotional photographs from Hollywood’s golden age make a perfect show for the postage stamp collector. Not only will her bijou paintings fit through the letterbox, they also come in a choice of bright colours that would readily set the first class stamp apart even in a busy collection. Women’s faces and objects lifted from black and white thrillers fill the frames to bursting. Stylised retro typography signals timeless nostalgia. These scenes are at once familiar and unplaceable, as though designed to appeal to all, yet grant the illusion of depth to the would-be connoisseur. For the philatelist on a budget, Maiuri even reprised her first day covers in miniature on unprimed and presumably cheaper canvas, effectively painting each image twice.
But seeing them once would be plenty. One can only imagine that some unconscious loathing of postmen or Hollywood motivated this project. Maiuri’s hatred of paint, on the other hand, is evident.
Conanico’s assemblages of shapes cut out of card and MDF board are so simple and playful that it would be easy to overlook them. Spray-painted rectangles connect to other rectangles like in a Blue Peter project. Curved shapes bear loads of miniature skyscrapers. Screws and washers hold a school science project together. These illustrations are each diagrams for something but to ask what is to miss the joke.
Such work could claim a place in the tradition of geometric abstraction but because Conanico doesn’t confine his paper cuttings to a canvas, or any plain for that matter, he overcomes it. His slight structures look like they could take flight at any moment and, in so doing, alter the fundamental laws of the universe. The sinister afterimage of such action, only barely implied by the work, would complete the show.
Anastasia PavlouReader, Part 2; The Reader Reads Words in Sentences
★★☆☆☆Hot Wheels, LondonOn until 16 December 2023A reading list accompanies this exhibition, and it includes names like Merleau-Ponty, Woolf, Hawking, and Berger. Pavlou explains in the handout that these are important to her thinking about painting, as are her own essays (not provided) and bullet point “Notes and Thoughts Around Things” on “the morphology of peripheral vision” and the meaning manifest outside of things.
This sounds silly but such a project is core to all art and Pavlou’s inquiry has a consistent internal logic. But what it has to do with the paintings – abstractions whose palettes and brushstrokes are so out of scale that they may as well be military camouflage – is left unexplained. Some clues come from the show’s odd elements: a shaky pencil drawing of a spider, black-and-white photographs of people in a museum, and one canvas that in contrast with the others is nearly monochrome.
But this is at once not enough and far too much. In this game of aesthetic cognition, the idea which survives is of the artist thinking. That’s no bad thing but it’s a pity that Pavlou’s viewers are not afforded the same pleasure.
In Wall’s femcel portraits, despair is sexy. Larger than life and rendered in Insta colours that could have been the choice of an image AI, her women perch at the bed’s end, squat by the wardrobe, and rest at the kitchen table. They’re bent out of proportion, showing off their skinny asses to the collector’s delight. Their boob tubes are tight, their shorts short. They play tired, scared, and helpless, just like you like them. They pulled these faces for you before. You will come back for more again.
The self-taught and presumably terminally online Wall may have experienced the faux emancipation of an e-girl first-hand. But her paintings are too brash and denatured to win in the battle over the 21st-century female body. Maybe sex work is the only work left in a world with no sex and universal online income. But there’s no dignity in paint when the arc of art history tends to “show hole”.
In The Rules of Art, Pierre Bourdieu scathingly described artists as sign-writers for hire willing to tailor their messages and beliefs to the highest bidder’s wishes. Thirty years on, this critique is outmoded because all art sloganeers the same thing and nobody pays artists anyhow.
Amer’s textile works weave and print a litany of clichés (“one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman”, for example) in unreadable cursive thread trace and overconfidently bold appliqué type. These snippets are so dull to the eye that the gallery reproduced the captions (“my body belongs to me and it does not represent the honour of anyone”) on the wall next to them. This invites a game of proofreading, in hope that Amer maliciously inserted a greengrocer’s apostrophe into de Beauvoir’s mind. But Bourdieu was right, after all: the signs stick to platitudes.
In Fung’s pastoral paintings and ceramics, the peaceful garden pond is the site of despair. Men weep into water lilies. The damned are locked in an underwater dance. Ghosts go fishing and fish are apex predators.
All this tries to be macabre and surreal like in Bosch or Miyazaki but is instead laughably twee, not least because this isn’t the only show on in London set at the bottom of a Victorian garden. Fung may be on-trend and her East Asian influences elevate the canvases a little but the clumsy sculptures send the whole show back to the garden centre.
It’s officially no longer “too soon” for mediocre 9/11 art. Singer’s installation mimics the lobby and office spaces of the World Trade Center which she remembers from visiting her mother at work. This could be a trauma theme park but is instead an excuse to show off a handful of paintings of characters associated with the attacks. The stylised photorealistic canvases have titles that suggest deepfakes and are elaborate in their making: a 3D artist, a model maker, and a make-up specialist are involved.
Singer has the benefit of ‘lived experience’ to defend her method but the content and extravagance of this production in central London are puzzling. This show would be better without the baggage of the artist’s personal story and even better without the Twin Towers altogether. The qualities of the image and Singer’s idiosyncratic construction of her subject are enough to deal with the event’s excess.
You’d never guess that Helen Johnson is an art therapist as well as a painter when her subdued hanging canvases come with titles like Late mirror stage, Transfence love, and Lack. Women, whole or in body parts, are thrown around these images by chaotic lines in shifting scales and perspectives. They’d like you to know that they’re thinking of serious matters (see Constituted object) but can laugh it off, too (Das Ding Dong). A series of smaller works at the back of the gallery momentarily inspires Bataille’s Story of the Eye but Johnson dispels such risqué associations with another run of prosaic captions.
This is the work of a mind that, having needlessly spent years in analysis, became hooked on ennui. Or, just as likely, of an artist who wasted her studio time misreading Lacan to the detriment of her praxis. The unescapable result are these dull, if technically proficient, paintings of boredom made for dull eyes. Their lack, in turn, is profound.
This modest display of the artist’s personal photographs of people, campsites, and dogs taken during her fifteen-year spell as a traveller and squatter and recently made up into four framed assemblies hardly makes for an exhibition. The tableaux, sparsely annotated in Petersen’s hand, sketch stories of free love, free movement, and free association.
But constrained by this gallery, they are merely vehicles for nostalgia. And that’s a pity because Petersen’s work of ‘giving voice to underrepresented communities’, as curatorial fashion today would have it, has roots in a life of both joy and struggle that social practice rarely succeeds in engaging. To go all out on it is no answer, either: Petersen’s website has pictures of this critic examining her much larger installation in 2019.
Such is the lot of political alternatives. Close up, Petersen’s innocents today conjure ideas of redneck resistance. At scale, of state-marketed utopia. The middle ground is envy.
This could be a lazy stockroom show or the greatest selection of the gallery’s works. We’ll never find out, however, because in Rodeo’s quirky tile, brick, and cobblestone Mayfair interior, it’s impossible to tell where a work ends and the wall begins. No amount of close contemplation helps and this exhibition is trying to explain the concept of ‘crazy paving’ to a blind man. Attempting to shut out the excess stimulus of the gallery fabric is so vexing that one longs for the works to either scream in brash colours or to disappear altogether. They do neither, and neither seems like a winning strategy anyway.
Rodeo previously staged charming, intimate, and minimal shows in this space. When ‘site-specific’ has become a dirty concept again, this show is worth seeing for its interior design student failure alone. After the storm, an opportunity to train one’s spatial sensibilities.
Inspired in form and attitude by Manhattan Art Review.
