There are pros and cons to working in Soho. I’ll get the cons out of the way first, hopefully you feel some schadenfreude at my expense: the morning gauntlet of delivery vans, bin men and lost tourists; the constant construction work; the oh-so-trendy kids setting up their fit check tripods; and, because I cycle, the cobbles on Broadwick Street. But none of that matters, really, because the pros more than make up for all the noise, swearing and saddle soreness: the sense of history in the narrow streets and alleys; the familiar faces at local cafes; that at one end of Berwick Street you have Golden Shawarma serving the best kofta wraps this side of the Med, and that the other end you can while away half an hour browsing magazines at Good News. I could go on, but without a doubt the best thing about working here is that almost every gallery in the city is just a lunch break away.
I have a morbid curiosity for studying how legacy brands update themselves for the Tiktok era. As a writer, I wouldn’t wish a pivot to video on my worst enemy. But that’s what Barbara Kruger is doing at the Serpentine in ‘Thinking of You. I Mean Me. I Mean You’, her first institutional solo show in London for 20 years. Some of her best known works (Your Body is a Battleground and I Shop Therefore I Am) have been given the big OLED screen treatment. I suppose this is meant to appeal to our social media obsessed society, but they’re no easier to shoot and share than a flat poster. That and some of the audio additions feel a little out of place (when was the last time you heard analogue static and canned laughter?). However, I’m glad to see that, unlike other artists of her generation, Kruger hasn’t yet sold out.
On Kingly Street, Sadie Coles is showing recent paintings by Wilhelm Sasnal. The works are characteristically inconsistent. You can trace his references back to all sorts of sources: snapshots, stock photographs, news reports, advertising boards, diagrams and user manuals. If there’s any consistency, it’s that Sasnal has a cynical vision of the world. His paintings homeless people, criminal mugshots, graffiti scrawled on buildings (LA IS NOT SAFE), endless freeways and self-defence manuals. There’s a literal, as well as emotional flatness to his work. There’s no mixing of colour and they’re painted so thinly that they could have been airbrushed. However, a few works have been ‘defaced’ with swirls of thick paint, as if out of frustration or failure he’s taken a biro to them. He seems to be saying there is a place for painting in this alienating, image-obsessed world, but it’s still uncertain.
Doron Langberg’s paintings at Victoria Miro recall, with hazy memory, nights out and mornings after. Downstairs, a set of lifesize canvases picture dancefloors and darkrooms. There’s no single focal point, so your eye ends up roaming the painting, trying to make sense of the shapes in the gloom. When it does settle, Langberg’s loosely-handled, chemically enhanced palette reveals the movement of naked men’s bodies under UV light. But I prefer the calmness and clarity of the paintings upstairs, particularly the monumental triptych of two half-dressed men crossing sand dunes by night, and opposite that, the figure reclining on the sofa in the light of the rising sun. There’s greater depth to these works. There’s a touch of Cezanne’s bathers and Toulouse-Lautrec’s watercolours; and there’s a hint of religion, helped by the chapel-like interior of the gallery; and even though the ecstasy of the night has worn off, the day remains full of possibility.
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