Venturi's Confusion

 

Bruno Zeti 'Towards An Organic Architecture' (1950) was, according to Vincent Scully in the intro of the 1977 reprint of Venturi's book 'Complexity And Contradiction In Architecture', a conscious reply to the austerity of Le Corbusier. 

Venturi sits somewhere between Zeti’s acceptance of the sexy organic and chaotic and the simplified but useful functionality of Modernist dreamers.

‘Venturi is more fragmentary,..his proposals, in their recognition of complexity and their respect for what exists, create the most necessary antidote to the cataclysmic purism of contemporary urban renewal which has presently brought so many cities to the brink of catastrophe, and in which Le Corbusier’s ideas have now found terrifying vulgarization.’ (Scully)

According to Scully the argument goes that if Le Corbusier learnt from the luminous austerity of the Greek temple then Venturi took influence from the ornate facades of Italian buildings - their decorative exterior designs curious flow forming a visual analogy to the parallel inside-outside, outside-inside flow of Italian residents physical movements. 

The self-conscious 'liminality' of the facades functions as a moment of transgressive passage between the communal and the intimate as a psychological / intellectual event congealed in ornate material stuff.

Within a couple pages of his Italian-façade-as-porous-threshold observation Scully confidently states that Venturi is one of the ‘very few architects whose thought parallels that of the Pop painters – and probably the first architect to perceive the usefulness and meaning of their forms’.

So, for Scully, Venturi saw a substantial part of architectures job was to act as a waystation, a valve allowing the action of movement between the outside (of the signage and prompts of popular and Pop Art culture) and the space and structure of an interior space (boiled down to essentials in Modernist architectural dreams).

Hmmm, it seems to be half-sensible, a Pop Art frivolity slathered all over Venturi’s twatting with Modernist tropes but isn’t that, ironically, only true on a lazy surface level? Venturi’s complacency is at a conceptual level rather than a formal or visual one.

It is interesting that within Venturi’s actual text as a model of critical application he indicates the literary criticism of Eliot. In some ways this is very revealing of the internal bifurcation within Venturi's critique of modernist constructions. Venturi is attempting to simultaneously react positively to the ‘natural’ everyday decorative demands of the human animal - bolstering his common-sensical polemic about these needs with an overarching and directive theory - whilst simultaneously locating an essentialist core to human requirements.

Venturi’s text is almost a protracted mission statement for seductively decorative yet functional buildings; that is functional as an ambient salve for the troubled psyche of contemporary urban folk (‘I am for messy vitality over obvious unity.’)

As an arch-ironist, certainly within his practice, it is interesting that Venturi has a swing at ‘… the popularisers who paint ‘fairy stories over our chaotic reality’ and suppress most complexities and contradictions inherent in art and experience.’ And yet his love of ‘messy vitality over obvious unity’ rests on a belief that architecture ‘has a special obligation toward the whole: its truth must be in its totality or its implications of totality.’ 

However, what happens when the totalising principle of Popular culture is already ‘fairy stories over our chaotic reality’?

Whilst criticising the debasement of Mie van der Rohe’s expression ‘less is more’ by inferior architects (where less is just less, so a fair point) he opines: ‘An architecture of complexity and contradiction, however, does not mean picturesqueness or subjective expressionism.’

However, Venturi has a tendency to overlook the fact that when dealing with a surplus of the insubstantial more less is just more less automatically leading to ‘picturesqueness or subjective expressionism.’ 

By suggestively paralleling op art and pop art he shows the hidden confusion in his hand. 

Pop art is primarily a conceptual art, a questioning critical deep dive into the engines which drive our cultural concerns; alternatively, op art is pop art with the difficult bits removed.   

Returning to Vincent Scully’s assessment of Venturi in the intro to the reprint of 'Complexity And Contradiction In Architecture' Venturi ‘…Like all original architects, makes us see the past anew.’ 

This is what Venturi signally fails to do. If anything through Venturi we see the now as a perpetual past.

A studied repetition of familiar populist décor and forms colonizing surfaces and invading interiors may add a temporary nipple of pacification to proceedings but it doesn’t have the weird gravitas of Pop Art’s ironic acceptance and sarcastic undermining of cultural norms and taste. Venturi’s art is basically one of resignation and repetition.

It’s not all bad though, he did have an awareness of the contingent nature of his own argument and, I believe, a real thirst for movement and progression within popular architectural builds.

He does register that ‘though we no longer argue over the primacy of form or function… we cannot ignore their interdependence’ and ‘… the variety inherent in the ambiguity of visual perception must once more be acknowledged and exploited.’

The fact of surface is of primary concern, and indeed the perceptual apprehension of an objective solidity of surface and forms is as important as the objective fact of the solidity of surface and forms.

That’s why I think that, in reality, he would like the possibility of relegating his own Las Vegas / Blackpool populism to a new status as another component option within an architecture of ambient mutating textures, really old school formal solidity and complex shadowplay, all interweaving and interleaving with the emblems and icons of transient popular culture if desired.

A new position for architecture of both playground engagement and analytical distancing which the new interiors/ archi-builds should allow - for practical, economic and moral reasons.

Noel Clueit : Various Artists

Following a twelve month plus Covid-related hiatus, Todmorden’s Studio 2 is showing ‘Various Artists’ by Noel Clueit. Actual stuff. Hanging on walls. In real space. 

The works on display largely the product of the lockdown period, Clueit has sliced-up record sleeves, often ones purchased with a certain indifference to the music sleeved inside, to re-position the resulting areas into new compositions or arrangements. Imagery is ignored. The factory-crisp coloured lines, synthetically pure washes of colour, the decorative embellishments of the covers; in short the playfully abstract design elements, become building blocks for new abstract configurations. 

The Utopian idealism(s) behind early models of international abstraction often had a metaphysical bent but always depended on an effort to bullet-point criteria for formal value judgments. 

And, in reality, there’s an accidental cultural immobility that sticks to the products of this kind of game plan; high art as ultra-tasteful balancing acts of shape and colour which can only really breathe successfully in a controlled and antiseptic environment. Elite, if perfectly enjoyable, décor being the real result. 

To a point this is both inevitable and not necessarily a completely bad thing. Isolating this type of aesthetic experimentation in galleries may be a safer bet than using them as a literal blueprint for social structures. 

And yet, simple molecular fragments of popular taste are equally serviceable for reconstructing effective non-representational compositions. Diagonals, circles, parallel skinny border lines and decorative repetitions, all carefully scalpel cut from 1970s and 80s record sleeves, allow small ‘abstract’ compositions to retain an echo of the material and visual ambience of the printed imagery of the period in which the records were produced. 

So Clueit’s domestic scale parodies of historical models of reductive ‘abstraction’ have no interest in the angsty splashings of Pollock, a form of painterly method acting like Brando stomping around a tasteful set; nor in the cool zen of a Newman stripe, a decorative equivalent to Olivier’s aristocratic aloofness. They are tonally closer to Roger Moore’s sarcastically arched eyebrow, an acknowledgement that artist-producer and viewer-consumer are both inside the game. But enjoying it none-the-less. 

Here, the endpoint of abstractions formal reduction transfers to popular decorative arrangements on the packaging and promotion of everyday products; the covers of records being a perfect playground for this transcriptive urge. The immediately familiar square motif of a vinyl record, thing as a form, area as bounded and bordered, becomes important. 

It is why lines are such an active physical component in Clueit’s works, they echo the boundary line of the rectangle but also control both the pictorial space, dissect it, contradict solidity, but also slow and accelerate the viewer’s pace of address. They take the eye on a looping wander or emphasis the porous, unstable nature of a bounding frame of nothingness. 

When playing a vinyl record the affectionately clumsy, slow spiral of the record players needle sweeps towards an empty centre; the tight spiral of the playback groove, duration and movement, repetitions and echoes are all factors in play. Clueit’s works cumulatively operate in a similar way. 

Significantly, on knowing the compositions source material it is hard not to begin imaginatively dismantling the matt and shiny areas of supporting printed cardboard and to fit them into an imaginary original image or record sleeve. To reconstitute an originating structure. 

The darkness behind the light and bright likeability of these works is the fact that a successful reimagining will not result in a metaphysical blueprint for a better society, it may just congeal into a back-cover from an 80s pop record.

Brian Mountford : Recent Paintings

    'Everlasting Gobstopper' - Brian Mountford

Mountford's paintings appear to be the nightmare imaginings of Philip Gustons crude and bloated paranoid figures.

 

Perplexing tapestries and tumbles of gizzards and body parts caricaturing the ponderous heft of real meaty innards. Or crudely and painfully dismantled living portraiture trapped in a hamster wheel of perpetual disassembly.

 

There's a hastily assembled pile of splayed hands and crinkled chunks of flesh peppered with eyeballs, their synchronised mechanical stares keening towards a point outside the framing rectangle of the canvas. Sausages of intestines are about to transmutate into turgid larva or insectoid pastiches of optic nerves. A blindly mechanistic tangle of tubes acts as a lumpen concretion of cartoon matter.

 

All cling to the wall like idiot hierarchies of dead materials straining towards agency and autonomy. Occasionally they are infected by decorative patterns which seem to creep like predatory abstractions dismantling the saccharine optimism of the colourful and synthetic palette.

 

Tethered to the picture surface by coloured muck, these psychedelic cousins of

Arcimboldo's proto-Surrealist vegetable heads suffer from a vague awareness of their own impermanence as whimsical fictions, contingent on external forces always beyond their comprehension.

 

It is not just a case of a staging of the typography of flesh as a psychological model of the human psyche or, indeed, a fixing of any concept within this cryptozoology of peculiar hybrids.

 

For Mountford the act of picturing an image is itself the essential core of the fact of painting. That's why the creatures of Mountford's dreamscapes radiate ennui and angst, like sullen hormonal teenagers they resent the processes building them whilst being begrudgingly aware that they are products of these processes.

 

The ineffable slipperiness of material objects as embodied meaning is being repeatedly restaged as potential narrative jumbles of a distantly remembered, antique plasticity.

 

But these cartoon distortions cannot indulge themselves by lounging in the way-station of the liminal, this will never be a comforting option, they remain perpetually impressed in the crust of surface paint that birthed them.

 

Without the possibility of recourse to material volume, they fall back on optical

volume to demand attention; strident and giddy bastard children of headshop posters.

 

Neon pseudocoma victims dreaming of the slop and sweat of imperfect flesh, they perform their poses whilst pleading for release from the eternal circus of art as a painterly self-flagellation and performance for the viewers entertainment.

  

 

Digi-Snaps: Let's Keep The Crap Ones.

 

 It seems to go like this:

 

The fading of printed photographs, those temporary slowing downs of the material  decay of things pictured, is an inevitable process. But, when considering the digitally reproducible, now incapable of attaching itself to a printed object this process of decay has become internalised by viewers and attached itself to the fungoid puffballs of our brains.

 

Like a William Burroughs mutating virus it has sneakily morphed into an unavoidable neurological condition. That of an atrophying physiological capacity to retain and store information, begrudgingly accepted by greedily addicted consumers of tsunamis of semi-random visual stuff.

 

And it is true that, rather than a parade of revealed truths, the profound and profane shallowness of vast quantities of moments and events pictured leaves the brains memory muscles weaker and less efficiently pliable.

 

Additionally, the whole procedure leaves an uncomfortable residue, the feeling that some unknowable external force has wiped its arse on the eyeballs.

 

Although it may leave a hazy cataract of stupidity clouding any selective filtration between hungry eye and passive brain this ocular coprophilia is infuriatingly addictive. Largely because the warm porridge of digi-snaps we mutually bathe in also acts as a sustaining social glue, a binding of bewildered status monkeys into something like a community.

 

However, if the unexamined life is not really worth living we all have a suspicion that the purely self-examined life is one never lived.

 

The reality is that most people toss their pennyworth of pictorial fun into a sea of images then register its efficiency by the ripples it makes. Is it reposted, rejigged, bastardised, recontextualised, generally pissed about with? And, more significantly, how often?

 

This could be claimed to be the case with any analog anchoring of forms in an old photograph. As an idea and as an object photographs have always spoken to, abutted and overlaid all other things which qualify as a photograph.

 

But now the process of production has accelerated to the point that their ghostly contemporary equivalents no longer stay still long enough to actually be looked at. The juddering informational flow of could-be photographs then bobs around in fat billowy invisible clouds waiting to be mined by aesthetes and commerce.

 

Intriguingly it may be that the human brain operates in a similarly arbitrary way, collecting a chain of momentary snapshots of the environments its associated body traipses through, then editing the compiled photo album later on. The concept of flow is one thing, our sensory capacity to experience it seamlessly may be something we delude ourselves into believing.

 

Now that various apps will edit down any backlog of randomly triggered and unseen images, then upload the ‘best quality’ ones for you the next logical development is to step away from any hands-on engagement with the process entirely.

 

Make a collage instead. After all there’s plenty of free material available through the internet. But let’s make sure the crap pictures have a secure future.

It may take a few hundred years to get around to looking at them. By then, they’ll look a lot more interesting than the buffed, polished and sharpened ones. And, hopefully, appear as gloriously heavy and untranslatable static snagging up the cogs of whatever mechanism tries to mangle them into passive inconsequentiality.

Louise Giovanelli

Manchester Art Gallery (Manchester, UK) is temporarily home to a new body of paintings by Louise Giovanelli supplemented by her selection of three Renaissance panels, including, from the gallery collection, a crucifixion from the school of Buoninsegna di Duccio and works from Victor Man and Mark Manders.

Her practice pivots on ‘the tension between representation  and materiality, and the relationship between contemporary and historic painting.’(1) 

Actually most contemporary painting does this. It’s probably more accurate to state that Giovanelli’s modus operandi is to reassert, and, in fact, consciously maintain, the tension between the physically substantial and the elusive febrile twitchiness of contemporary images potential for fluidity, their easily unanchored transferability and temporary there-ness. 

Giovanelli also has a liking of both the physical intimacy of artisanal engagement with surface and the bullish certainties of architectural space. So Duccio's 'Transfiguration' (1307 - 11) and the aforementioned 'Crucifixion' (1315 - 30) show the time worn delicacy of a gold leaf surface and scuffed brown frame contained within a protective framing box. The religious imagery shows a clumsy but strangely sophisticated spatial hovering of figures asserting the solidity of the painting whilst alluding to the transcendent aspirations of the works. 

However, Giovanelli proceeds by highlighting the facts that, by necessity, all painting indulges a conceptual obfuscation: misting over its failure to force forms to congeal into the cohesive bulk of an object and the knowledge that the tangible can only become legible through introspection.  A process analogous to a spatial withdrawal from experiential encounter with surface qualities, a slow calibrated disconnection from haptic interface with materiality, to allow oneself to build meaning from the experience. 

So, images emerge from a surface chaos of materials but they require a physical distance before being perceived. However, they only really become productively functional when residing within or in front of their founding materials. They are contrarily tied to their material ground and present only when denying their material grounding - the images are actually present by being perceived as existing at spatially impossible points. apparently pressed into the surface and simultaneously hanging like a sheet of visual information projected onto surface.

A seductive clutter of areas of decorative repetition, wallpaper, vegetation, clothing and textile patterns infect any number of paintings, a restrained anarchy of curves and marks reminding viewers of the surface illusion of the medium itself. Giovanelli has a particular liking of the fat curves and splayed repetitions of the acanthus leaf and 'abstracts' its shapes into a number of velvet-blue and inky-blue oil paintings. The motif is present in the rich green background of a Victor Man portrait from 2015. Giovanellis use of the forms are presented like close-ups of a bunched layering of acanthus leaves; this presentation of layering as a constructive process is most effective with 'An Ex V' which has additional drawn cut marks of heavy blue, almost calligraphic in their controlled curvatures, which slice through the optical compression of layers.

Another recurrent editing or cropping of image within the artists work is the horizontal bisecting of the ovoid of the human head below the eye-line, an enforced realignment of viewers visual focus towards the mute mouth of the half portraits and their fleshy expanses of throat and neck. 

This personalised trope is employed in the bleached grainy pink-red heads of 'Billyo V' and 'Billyo VI'. Whilst previous exhibitions have seen Giovanelli using seams and edgings of lace as emphasised points of differentiation between clothing and flesh, between tones of materiality, here milky washes veil the concrete certainties of form. 

The half heads of these paintings appear to be picturings of a section of a sculpted figure prone in a sleeping position. Like 'Para' there seems to be an allusion to a digital transcriptive fixing of the solid forms, the addition of a bright narrow framing bands of colour on a number of paintings often tonally indicating the mechanical coldness of photographic media.

This editing device is also represented here with the three paintings 'Marker V', 'Marker VI' and 'Marker VII' a repeated cropped image, the top and bottom line of the cropping slightly varies giving a degree of additional information when all three are mentally overlaid to a final image. Each rendering has a subtly different degree of lightening or bleaching of the source picture and each carry a fluid horizontal line which cuts across the throat. Each rendering has a marking of two short parallel vertical lines on the neck which are hard to interpret. They are strong and rather lovely pastel coloured paintings with a suggestion of the necessary violence done when dissecting source materials.

The synthetic smoothness of the rendering of skin gives the paintings a second or even third-hand distance from the regular whorls, bruises, marks and impurities of real human skin - the paintings actually suggest quotations of, or echoes of, earlier examples of pictorial intimations of flesh. 

Giovanelli's interest in the history of the medium is slyly very much a concern with its acknowledgement and apprehension through digital media, or rather its contemporary perception as mediated through academia, images in books and the now ubiquitous digital media.

The dematerialisation of painting as tangible thing. its reduction to image-fact which has peeled away from its material grounding changes the pace of its address by the on-looker or viewer.

The 'Marker' paintings are really an additional show infiltrating the larger exhibition. They are shown on different walls but impossible not to be perceived as one work in three locations: a restaging of Giovanelli's impulse to use the architectural layout and surfaces of a display space, a recolonizing of galleries and display spaces with rectangles of painted surfaces allowing her to take back a degree of control over the pace of viewing, the speed at which a visitor can address the material fact of the component units which jigsaw into the final exhibition.

The formative context of gallery and its inseparability from the institutional action of constructing a viewing subject is being hijacked into her practice. Ostensibly a productive deathliness or constraining limbo, contrary to times movements as a thing felt,  it is strategically employed to congeal narrative flows authoritative certainties.

Giovanelli may enjoy the impenetrable fact of a paintings presence but she also recognises the rich potential of absence. 

By using the relative blankness of areas of wall, time stretches between the painted panels and any definitive 'meaning' dumbly hangs in the dead air of the vertical surfaces between the panels.

Ultimately Giovanelli likes the painting-object to operate with the same knotty compression of intentions exhibited in literature. The eloquence of anonymity, the historical function of justifying established social hierarchies with painted images; such things may be thematically present but never at the expense of a broader obsession with making clear the essentially conceptual alchemy of balancing material solidity with the feral slipperiness of imagery as meaning generators. 

1.    ‘Louise Giovanelli - In Conversation’ -  Anomie Publishing (2017)

                                      ‘Rituals Of Looking’ (pages 6 - 11)

                                             - Charlotte Keenan McDonald (page 7)

                                       Edited by Linda Pittwood and Guy Tindale

                                                        ISBN: 978 - 1 - 910221 - 13 - 6

Joe Devlin: 'Gatefolds.'

 
                             

                              

Joe Devlin’s work has historically centred on copying, transcribing or somehow reusing the stains, interventions and scribbled marginalia that borrowers have left peppering the pages of library books.

His Todmorden-based exhibition ‘Gatefolds’ is at a slight variance from his usual productive theft. Here Devlin has lifted a page of simple line drawings recording the different structural designs of farm gates, probably from a 1930s book. All twelve designs have bold no nonsense regional names: ‘Pembroke’, ‘Montgomery’, ‘Cumberland’, and so on.

Devlin’s page compiling these appropriated reductive drawings are blankly neutral presentations indicating these hinged structures; hard delineations of the operationally active which are themselves mechanical reactions to any compulsion to expressively map with the tools of drawing.

Acting as retreating markers between the mucky black sky-mirroring  puddles, the crusting cow-pats, the bumps and contours which coat rough horizontal rectangles of field and ground; the organizing frameworks of gates map the pastoral landscape.

The thick black lines framing blocks of white paper suggest drably functional pieces of landscape furniture, ones designed to either regulate, or at least to slow the pace of, independent movement But they also act as guides for the viewing eye to trace the hermetically sealed linear structures bounded by its framing horizontal oblong format.

In a further act of physical transcription the linear designs have been re-presented as small aluminium-silver freestanding, shelf-bound sculptural works. Miniature Modernist inflected rectangles with the beginnings of gentle, Origami folds dictated by the vertical and diagonal lines of the source diagrams which have then been photographed, the photographs layered in a pile in the corner of the studio. A potential book-in-waiting.

A simplistic reading of the show could assume that the territorial musings of a confused mid-Brexit UK are somehow being alluded to by an ‘appropriation’ of regional variations in directive field furniture. This is, however, an intentional comedic act of misdirection. 

The real substance of the exercise is both much simpler and considerably more complex. The literalness of the lurching moments of transcription folds back on themselves, from deformation of the authority of the original taxonomy of regional gates to their productive reimaginings as ‘art-objects’ which then, via photography, head back to the flat universe of images and their inevitable supporting text.

Even if they detour through rigid and legible formal structurings - the written word, sculptures shapes and depths, photography’s ‘indexicality’ and digital shiftiness - the meandering and interweaving functions of author, reader, viewer and producer are the actual constants. The assumed authority of an  originating authorship is the slyly targeted centre of the artist’s criticism, even if this includes undermining the primary importance of artists themselves in the whole interpretive game.

Chester Tenneson: 'Half Of Two Days Of Everything'.

In Salford's Paradise Works, Chester Tenneson's exhibition 'Half Of Two Days Of Everything' mixes sculptures formed from collisions of accrued kitsch objects with examples of the more widely exhibited text and signage pieces. 

Titles seem to be lifted from literature and the lyrics of pop songs; all in the service of mining popular culture to construct physical incarnations of moments of poetic sarcasm.

Tenneson has a preference for the high-fidelity banality of functional objects with a plasticised shouty-ness, everyday things as heightened visual events nodding towards the distancing paradigm of digital purity. They are objects that aspire to the cheeky inconsequentiality of flat and decorative signage.

The largest pieces are floor-bound combinations of functional items and cartoony toy items echoing blandly useful things. So 'Out Here On The Mountain Top' (2018) is a square art packing case topped by a miniature but not insubstantial black umbrella, open and, impossibly, standing up by the curved handle resting on the wooden surface. 'You're Like An Automatic" (2019) has a handful of wavy plastic chips spooning each other in the curved indentation of a polystyrene brick's surface. 'More, More, More' (2018) uses three trainers as snug bases for three fatly inflated inflatable walking sticks; their curving handles grumpily facing away from each other. 

The best of these works is 'The Victory Cry' (2019); a table tennis net raised from the ground at each end of its length by aluminium-silver cleaning stanchions, its horizontal sag emphasized by a weighting square of sticking plaster. It sulkily radiates the prosaic inevitability of a predictable British Wimbledon defeat.

The smaller sculptural collisions presented on a line of white shelves are more immediately like-able but stick in the grey matter less successfully. The exception being 'Ashes to Ashes' (2018) in which a lumpy ash grey arch of an aquarium rock and a horizontal plastic cigarette bring to mind a pissed golem on a fag break.

Tenneson's confident use of the volume of real space has been ratcheted up further by hijacking Paradise Works projection and digital image playback space as an almost blacked out installation. A short line of cinema seats face a floor grounded light-box announcing 'A PAUSE', the restful break time from opening night socialising undercut by the regular sonic irritant of a clacking metronome.

Even here the space of the room is formally restructured as a series of flat theatrical layerings and positionings of viewer and information-object.

Cognisant of the retreating vagueness of object-biased culture Tenneson seems to enjoy taking pre-fabricated things for a wander back into the arena of flattened signs; that is to say literal, functional popular signage. This adds a tragicomic incorrectness to proceedings and yet, far from nonsense, the works themselves radiate an ironclad logic; one which is, however, hard to re-articulate outside the idiot slap of the visual.  

The flatter text on board paintings of 'HALF OF TWO DAYS OF EVERYTHING' (2019) and fourteen part 'Birds never look into the sun (Social media paintings)' (2018 - 19) have the visual punch of informational signs. Blocky text sits on simple decorative grounds, avoiding the diaphanous layerings of obsessively painterly engagements with surface, and transcribe the spatial grandeur of the more bombastic of Ed Ruscha's horizon-hugging signage into claustrophobic square patternings like polite slices of wallpaper design. 

'ALLEGORICAL NUDES' announces a dark blue acrylic and gouache; 'PHOTOGRAPHED AT LEAST ONCE    IF NOT TWICE' darkening blue letters observe seated on a washy pink background; 'BOB' has the eponymous Bob (or possibly an insinuated verb 'Bob') as text on a scruffy skyblue hovering over a white strip of horizon; keeping it simple 'TUPPERWARE IN HER APARTMENT' states a blank white square of canvas board - and so, inventively, on and on goes the pithy little text works. All enjoyably slightly left-field and smile inducing.

The pivotal piece is the most easily overlooked one, 'Entre tes reins (Unknown Meeting)' (2017) already handily 'meta' with its description of 'painting-drawing printed onto vinyl, on vinyl.'  A small portrait format rectangle of yellow vinyl stuck directly on the wall, each corner infected by a thumb print scale, slightly raised simulation of blue tack. 

It places the viewer on the wrong side of a hastily produced office notice, combines the functional, banal and eye-catching with a spatially impossible vantage point, and in the process reanimates the attenuated confabulations of the neighbouring sculptures; enforcing an unanchored solidity to them. One which then loops back to the interleaving two-dimensional simplicity of the text work.