Last week I was at Reference Point with the rest of the London lit scene for the launch of Philippa Snow’s latest book, Trophy Lives. In it, Snow argues that celebrities are the art objects of our time; they’re designed and sculpted and sold just as any other artwork is, they’re sources of aesthetic and moral lessons, and as such they’re worth criticising and understanding. On that point, there’s no one better placed than Snow, whose sharp and dry delivery strips her subjects down and skewers them. The short reading she gave on the night focused on Kim Kardashian. Snow admitted that she doesn’t think of Kim in particularly negative nor positive terms, simply that as a product of the celebrity-art system she’s “fucking fascinating.” She’s not wrong, as Ruby Dickson proved recently. I was persuaded by Snow’s argument, but don’t expect any red carpet reviews here soon.
On the surface, Theodore Ereira-Guyer’s work at Cedric Bardawil is a simple take on classic subjects of art history: dense forests, mountains at dusk and portraits of ancient busts by way of Paul Cézanne. Behind the scenes, it’s a complicated process: it begins with sketches, he then etches steel plates with acid washed brushes, he applies printing inks, and casts the inked plate in wet plaster which absorbs the ink as it dries. By the time the works are hung on the gallery wall, they’re somewhere between painting, print, fresco and bas relief. Throughout this extended process, Ereira-Guyer has to imagine his scene in positive and negative images, while working with processes that leave a lot to chance – there’s no correcting once the plaster’s poured. It might be better to think of these images as memory exercises and laboratory experiments, rather than faithful reproductions of people and landscapes. Today, many artists have settled into certain methods of working and safe images – it’s good to see an artist breaking the mould.
Marria Pratts’ paintings at Carl Kostyál bring the scale and energy of Cy Twombly to the off-model Disney characters daubed on the sides of ice cream vans. Ever since seeing the Philip Guston show at the Tate Modern, I’ve been looking for more cartoonish art, and I’m happy to have found it here. In fact, there is a distinct Guston flavour to her work: cars, punching fists, wonky clocks, ladders and hooded ghosts in bubblegum pink, red and blue. But Pratts paints with an apparent spontaneity that you don’t see in Guston’s comic book consistency: her pictures are flecked and stained; her characters are only half painted; all across the canvas, words and phrases are scrawled into the wet paint with the wooden tip of her paintbrush. It’s as if she hasn’t fully settled on what she wants from her pictures. Her paintings take me back to my teenage years, and all the uncontained frustration, boredom, joy, and naivety of youth. Back then, stuck in school, often the only way to express that was with a gouge in a table or the page of a textbook. Pratts captures that, and pours it onto the canvas.
It’s unclear whether Allan Gardner’s paintings at Cob Gallery are supposed to provoke or please. Each canvas is painted in heavily diluted, pastel coloured oil paints applied so thinly that you might mistake them for watercolours, blended with a few choice words in loose, cursive lettering; moment, always, happy, eternal, ceaseless, forever. It’s an unfashionable style of painting that puts him at odds with the current trend for figuration, and it’s the sentimental language of gravestones, greeting cards, MSN screen names and regretful tattoos. I think of them as Rorschach tests; look at the oil blots, what do you see? Do you think these are desperately beautiful or do you think they’re deeply sad? Are the words fading from memory or repeating in affirmation? When you try to define “forever” do you look to the dictionary definition of the word or to an image? And are these works paintings or writings? I see them as kitsch parodies of all the ways people try to immortalise moments and feelings. Mocking both poets and painters and their claims to making art that will last forever.
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The meal deal: ‘Hovering on the Edge’ at Timothy Taylor, Judith Bernstein at Emalin, ‘With Urgency’ at Ilenia
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The meal deal: Nick Waplington at Hamiltons Gallery, Renata de Bonis at Lamb Gallery, HelenA Pritchard at TJ Boulting
