27/03/25


Torch gallery - 'Perennial' - Anya Jansen - 1st March until 5th April

Not Good

I don’t go here usually, but Annet Gelink was closed so I thought what the hell. The source that this painter draws from seems to be photographic. There are two landscapes that are painted from an anti-vertiginous earthly position. I like them, except for these novel renderings of an emulsive chemical spill, these are flourishes that the painter feels like they need to add to her paintings. It’s clear that she has gone with the flourish and not the landscape to generate new ideas for her work. Fine, but one gets the feeling she’s stuck not knowing which horse to back. Art can be cheated-on, or worse. This exhibition has all the imagination of a relationship that doesn’t get to start, an imagination that rejects the world and becomes fetid, not fecund. Work should be a protest against what you do not see in the world, I think that’s a quote from Kerry James Marshall about looking at art in museums. Anyway, the artists sees something, something that I share, an interest in giraffe cadavers, for instance, and the gesture of dangling your feet over each other (something I do when I’m bed, or, something I’d do if I was a good jew who just fell in with the wrong sort of Romans). But there is a disparity here between artistic generative ability and my ability to move beyond aesthetic asceticism. It is my job to build this aestheticism, not the artists, but it is through art that it has been built. I need to be pulled into the making of art. It’s not my job to move beyond pure desire, that is the artists. I attest this can be a unison, it’s just here I don’t want to get involved.

Iain Sterdam goes to the Jordaan

Gallerie Fons Welters - 'Spreading Elegance' - Evelyn Taocheng Wang - 22 March Until 10 May

Not Good/Good

I had almost given up on contemptorary art until I saw the Mike Kelley show in Dusseldorf. It was almost a complete exhibition except I hated the superman bell jar room, I don’t read superman comics, I’m not a yank. Still, there was no reluctance to use his own vernacular, the office humour of drawing boobs and cocks on things, a small space was weaned open. Also the way he talked about theory as if it was just ‘there’ in the art world, like in the back of everyone’s mind, he was a nineties anomaly, a shining deformed star… I remember listening to an interview with Kelley where he said ‘the gift’ had begun to make its appearance into the art world and art theory, artists in two-step with the galleries they were working with had begun to offer their work to the public making their work (if not literally) feel mass-produced, which he thought was a turn backwards to Catholicism and the virtue of doing good work. The problem with ‘the gift’ for Kelley was that when you were on the receiving end, you never knew how much to pay back, and so the object becomes one of unknown desire. If the work becomes a gift that the artist bestows, It’s not hard to see the way artists, public and gallery are cutting themselves out of a fair shake. I’d prefer work to not be given to me, it makes it cheap. Galleries and museums are there to sell, the gift is a way of appearing socialist and then reaping the profits of goodwill. A little like what the Catholic Church does to the words that Jesus said.

The story goes that you receive an item of clothing from Evelyn Taocheng Wang and you write about ‘elegance’. She is not presenting the work as a gift, instead the artist ossifies the correspondence between a circle of people, for which the artist, having a show, is at the centre. There is a fun watchedness to this work, especially by the artists collaborators who know they’re in a show and perform this slightly performative handwriting that you must perform when you are writing a letter to your grandma, knowing the fireplace eave is your Louvre. The self-conscious is a place artists go to in order to show the universal for what it is, a fakery. The good artists go there with poise, which is why work dealing with regret is hard to make. She has used some of the handwriting gleaned from one of her collaborators to create large wall hanging fabric pieces. The handwriting when stitched onto these pieces is blown-up, expanded. There is one about an inner narration of a dress not fitting properly, I like it, it has all the best parts of feminist wit. The fabric pieces format is ugly, austere, classical and the stitched ‘handwriting’ can’t help itself and pushes the work over the edge, a bit like Randstad Neoclassicist houses. Short-back & facades with a baroque flourish on top please.

My gripe is that the artist can’t seem to throw old work away. There is an ongoing aspect to her work, it’s been done before, as the exhibition text mentions. I’m as weary of ‘ongoing’ as I am ‘nonlinear’ in art jargon, they are usually shorthand for ‘unfinished’. Kelley throughout his career showed an artist that was able to throw away a style of working when it suited him despite it being in everyone’s best interests for him to continue with it. With Wang, everything becomes incorporated and so the joys of the show are also the weaknesses. The ink drawings that are exhibited on the tables on thick paper are beautifully figurative and have these large swirling thick oil paint masses in them. The blobby masses come close to ruining the drawings, but somehow become incorporated.

The polite immigrant is a good pose (it shows the sloppiness of European art academies as they half heartedly skirt around Gropius’ wheel), she’s used it before in her studies of Agnes Martin, making me see both the artist she was referencing and her own work in a new light. And she’s furthering it here. In the new drawings she juxtaposes ink drawings of architectural facades and exercise sheets from Dutch language courses onto paper. A good juxtaposition makes sure the two separate items come as they are, if they were able to merge they wouldn’t be a juxtaposition. These new pieces aren't that, they feel too doctored.

Gallerie Fons Welters - 'Another Side of All in Your Shadow' - Soshiro Matsubara - 22 March until 10 May

Good

At last, a boudoir. At the artist's request the exhibition space has been draped in a maroon-dyed canvas, and a maroon-printed patterned plastic floor. The room is covered by a lowered ceiling, a mesh piece of fabric. It takes a while for you to notice the detail, there is an illusion of sloppiness. Sure you can use every material in the book, and most artists know that, do that, and leave the audience wanting. Punk was just a stepping stone for Post-Punk, remove the aggression, keep the quick thinking. How can a colour be trapped in stasis? The temporal act teasing the audience. A red stick. Golden tie wrap, Clay. Walking back through the show, I was drawn back to the sculpture on draped plinth. When I was not familiar with the artist's work I was drawn to the sculpted skulls, but my eye soon glazed over them as I would over a detailed souvenir. Upon walking back I noticed the same sculpture and saw my foolishness for not seeing the sculpted hands, placed opposite the skulls, rendered with a slight mannerist touch. It’s not in detail where Soshiro shines but in formal galumph. A good push and pull between the artist and exhibition space.