February 3rd, 2010 Adrian Searle
Saatchi Gallery, London
The Empire Strikes Back is a wet punch. One might expect Charles Saatchi to show just the sorts of things that are presented: a stuffed camel in a suitcase, a taxidermied dog morphing with a furry vacuum cleaner, photographs of veiled women whose burkas turn out to be pixelated with tiny porn shots, yet more of Subodh Gupta's over-familiar sculptures made from cooking utensils, a black medical cot piled high with tarry mattresses that breathe wheezily to the power of compressed air. There are painted gags about Jasper Johns, dystopian jokes about technology, including a rattling old Xerox machine with half its gubbins missing, and an army of figures made from old floor lamps, neon tubes, discarded bits of plumbing. I see a GCSE-level art project coming on.
This isn't to say that The Empire Strikes Back is all bad. Some pieces are worse than bad, others just obvious. A speech by Gandhi spelled out in bones adds nothing to any argument. It just took a long time to make. T Venkanna's reworked versions of Douanier Rousseau are fun and sexy, and so is Chitra Ganesh's cartoon of a liberated Indian superwoman. Rashid Rana's pixelated view of an endless sea of rubbish is queasily beautiful, and – best of all – Yamini Nayar's photographs of half-abandoned rooms take us somewhere strange and oddly threatening.
A lot of the work looks exoticised for the gallery, the artists playing up their post-colonial otherness as a gimmick, rather than making art of substance. This exhibition gives us no clearer view of the art of a subcontinent than did a recent Serpentine gallery exhibition. There's also no film or video – areas where some of the best work is made.
Rating: 2/5
Posted in Art, Art and design, Culture, Exhibitions, India, Installation, Painting, Reviews, Saatchi gallery, Sculpture, The Guardian | Comments Off
February 2nd, 2010 Adrian Searle
Saatchi Gallery, London
The Empire Strikes Back is a wet punch. One might expect Charles Saatchi to show just the sorts of things that are presented: a stuffed camel in a suitcase, a taxidermied dog morphing with a furry vacuum cleaner, photographs of veiled women whose burkas turn out to be pixelated with tiny porn shots, yet more of Subodh Gupta's over-familiar sculptures made from cooking utensils, a black medical cot piled high with tarry mattresses that breathe wheezily to the power of compressed air. There are painted gags about Jasper Johns, dystopian jokes about technology, including a rattling old Xerox machine with half its gubbins missing, and an army of figures made from old floor lamps, neon tubes, discarded bits of plumbing. I see a GCSE-level art project coming on.
This isn't to say that The Empire Strikes Back is all bad. Some pieces are worse than bad, others just obvious. A speech by Gandhi spelled out in bones adds nothing to any argument. It just took a long time to make. T Venkanna's reworked versions of Douanier Rousseau are fun and sexy, and so is Chitra Ganesh's cartoon of a liberated Indian superwoman. Rashid Rana's pixelated view of an endless sea of rubbish is queasily beautiful, and – best of all – Yamini Nayar's photographs of half-abandoned rooms take us somewhere strange and oddly threatening.
A lot of the work looks exoticised for the gallery, the artists playing up their post-colonial otherness as a gimmick, rather than making art of substance. This exhibition gives us no clearer view of the art of a subcontinent than did a recent Serpentine gallery exhibition. There's also no film or video – areas where some of the best work is made.
Until 7 May. Details: www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk
Rating: 2/5
Posted in Art, Culture, India, Reviews, Saatchi gallery, The Guardian | Comments Off
February 2nd, 2010 Jonathan Jones
With echoes of 18th-century master Watteau, Mosely does something beautifully rare: think, not just paint
I like the paintings of Ryan Mosley, currently showing at London's Alison Jacques Gallery, for their marriage of grit and fantasy. Tough, hard-thought, intelligent textures – real painting, in other words – create realms of wilful play. Is it whimsy or is it tragedy? I'm not sure. The ambiguity interests me.
Let me put this praise in context. I am not saying Mosley is a genius, but I am saying this 30-year-old's first serious solo show is unusually promising, indeed that some of the promise is already fulfilled. Mosley's best paintings are his biggest. There's a fine freedom and confidence to his large, even slightly grandiose, pictures that imagine a balletic Wild West, as if painted by Antoine Watteau.
That 18th-century ghost haunts the best painting of all, a spacious white canvas with a minstrel playing a banjo – it's called Southern Banjo – beneath a tree. Isolated in his minstrelsy, at once proud and solitary, this timeless figure makes an immediate appeal to your sense of pathos. Mosley is a young 21st-century painter tackling themes comparable with those that Wallace Stevens described in his poem, inspired by Picasso, The Man With the Blue Guitar.
It's hard to be negative about any of the works here. What matters is the sense that here is a painter doing what painters need to do: work. He is thinking through paint, and finding in its demands a complex, skilled style of his own, in the only place this can be done, the studio.
Mosley has just been exhibited in St Petersburg – at the Hermitage, no less – in Charles Saatchi's exhibition Newspeak: British Art Now. This survey comes to London in June. I wouldn't want to bet on its overall quality, but his encouragement (and collecting) of Mosley shows that Saatchi still has the ability to spot real talent first.
Posted in Art, Art and design, Blogposts, Culture, guardian.co.uk, Painting, Saatchi gallery | Comments Off