Notes from the galleries. (I am trying to go see art more regularly. Perhaps you'd like to join me?)
Plato's (and Jung's) cave
Gary Hume's Cave Paintings appear to be drawings inscribed in lead line into marble, but are in fact a mason's bricolage of different stones, with lead for mortar. They're very handsome, but blank emotionally.
The press release informs me that Hume pits "the sensibilities of an ornate Baroque decor against the aesthetic of the young city professional's start flat". That apartment is one of a stack of caves, and the young professional watches the flickering light on the wall from the flat-screen television, slipping into sleep and dreams of "reduced and suggestive" symbols - protective mothers, reaching children, of shadows moving on dark slate walls, of nurture and ritual, a slab of soft-veined green, birth of man, of doubt, death...
The marble tone determines whether they are seen as brutally flat, or illusionistic depth. Up close, everything is flattened by the surface texture. The black marble in The Pendulum (2006) is so smooth of surface and cut edge that it looks like poured resin. There's a similar black stone in The Adoration of the Magi (2006), though there the white marble is so split and cracked that the interstitial lead linework has become polyfilla, holding it together. Magi has a distinctly provisional quality: it's held together with a metal frame at the sides. Next to it, Milk Full (2006), a child/pizza figure is embedded in white marble that has split (look at the White Cube's official image: it looks as if it was delivered broken).
Mother Mortality (2006) turns up the dial on the archetypal motifs and adds art history to its palette. Mother looks like a Bacon pope, the background as if Adami has redrawn a staircase for descending nudes in lead foil.
Last chance to see: Gary Hume's Cave Paintings, at White Cube, 26 May - 1 July 2006 - a page painfully excavated from the useless White Cube gallery website.
Telegraph: Rebirth of the artist: "Hume is not very good at emotion: and he can't even get it out of a squalling infant. What he can do, when he cares to, is aesthetics. Mother Mortality, despite the nauseating name, is beautiful. Here all the obvious art-historical allusions of working in stone and jewel-like surfaces are brought into view"
Jonathan Jones was scathing in the Guardian: "An enthusiast might draw comparisons with the Italian baroque or Mussolini's Rome, but in art, allusions don't pay the rent and nor does an irony so dessicated and bitter it could be from some wafer-thin waspish 1920s novel. Whatever emotions are teased into play didn't nourish me beyond the walk back to the tube. As with many of his paintings, the feeling doesn't quite gel. It stays in a shallow part of you and is blown away with the dust of the street."
Vitreous edges
Down the road at The Agency, I have left the cave for the woods and rocky slopes that surround it. There is a tableau of black, oily/vitreous fired trees and shards of slate-like rock on a table that overfills the room. On the walls, there are some paintings are carefully identified to me as "for an event, not part of the exhibition", as if that caveat will excuse them. So I edge around the table, tracking a narrow path between the paintings and the table. Looking at these trees, I want to think Caspar David Friedrich (a Romantic/sublime flight of imagination to a Northern European heart of darkness), but actually am wondering if the trees will be shiny and hard like glass, or leave a mark on my hand. On leaving, I manage, inexplicably, to not go to Counter Gallery.
Alone in Engladesh
The sun drives me to a pit stop at Richmix, which is empty, the staff outnumbering me several to one; nonetheless a manager tells a staffer off for being six hours late to work in public. They have converted half of the atrium/cafe area into a big screen with astroturf seating - which although unoccupied now, has clearly been a success. "Same game, same fun" it says. There are group fixture tables chalked onto the steel collared around Hamish's two-storey concrete columns. The football target ranges seem to be styled in the favela manner. The scoreboard next to them reveals the hybrid loyalties of the local kids: several players name their affiliation as "Engladesh".
The Banglasdeshi artist Leepu Awlia is modding (or hot-rodding?) an old Ford Capri, but with a welding rather than with plastic body kits. It's cheerful, high-energy stuff, and reminiscent of those car ads in which people around the world resourcefully bash up and mash up their cars and fishing boats to make them look like a vernacular, cargo-cultish versions of a Peugeot 206.
The big screen is now projecting mobile phone and car insurance adverts to the empty cafe. I'm glad there's no-one to see it, because, without a Peugeot 206 ad, it doesn't seem to fit the ethos of rich mix. Shortly afterwards, the football fans start to drift in, and I drift out.
Richmix: Leepu Awlia's car blog.
Tomorrow
Michelle Grabner at Rocket, Danny Rolph at Hales, group show at Andrew Mummery, Intrusion at Bischoff/Weiss, Drawn In at Seventeen and Claire Harvey at Store Gallery.
Join me: I am trying to go see art more regularly. Perhaps you'd like to join me?
