Poetry of place
Andrew Lambirth
London Now: City of Heaven, City of Hell Guildhall Art Gallery, London EC2, until 9 April Is London a model city or a sink of iniquity? Defining things in terms of extremes is of course a typical dialectical strategy intended to stimulate discussion. London is a melting-pot, a vast stew of energies and lassitudes, of good and evil. In this exhibition we are offered a taste of how artists respond to its present-day reality: ten contemporary painters and one sculptor interpret London as she lives and breathes. Subtitled ‘A Provocative Exhibition’, this display has been put together by Mireille Galinou of the London Arts Café. It’s worth a visit, not because it will resolve any debate about the state of the capital, but because it features some rather good painting and serves to draw attention to one of the city’s all-but-invisible treasures — the Guildhall Art Gallery.
Once you’ve passed the security guards and had your luggage X-rayed (getting into this museum is like boarding a plane), proceed downstairs. The exhibition is prefaced by a corridor introduction of text and a couple of paintings, which afford a précis of its theme. Both paintings depict Smithfield Market, but in very different ways. On one side is Sharon Beavan’s intense, almost mediaeval vision of a pilgrimage of porters carrying animal carcases on barrows to the great meat market, which looms across the painting like a cathedral. Red with the spilt blood of beasts, the picture is punctuated by the long blue smocks of the porters. To a vegetarian, the arch of Smithfield probably gapes like the mouth of Hell; certainly, Beavan’s painting is unmistakably corporeal. Ben Johnson’s painting, on the other hand, is ethereal, depicting the girders supporting the roof of the market’s arcade. It looks even more like a cathedral than Beavan’s painting: a hymn to harmony and organised structure, a leaping vault which is a small marvel of engineering. Here, perhaps, is a more interesting dichotomy: the unruly material world versus spiritual perfection. As usual, it’s all in the eye of the beholder.
Enter the exhibition proper, and Alec Worster’s plaster and wire sculptures of the homeless at once claim the attention. Huddled on the floor, they crave our compassion for their real-life counterparts. This is the section devoted to Hell, and the walls are taken up with David Hepher’s vast paintings of tower blocks. Unfortunately, this subject has been an obsession for Hepher for the past 30 years. He’s a very good painter, and I wonder how many people have been put off his work by its subject, or simply got bored with it. To do him justice, he is continually inventing new ways of dealing with the graffitied walls and lowering presences of these monsters, and if you isolate a section of painted wall from one of his pictures you can often arrive at something as beautiful or arresting as a Prunella Clough painting. But, as in life, it’s difficult to ignore the relentless towers. There are four rooms opening off this hall of urban blight. Each is devoted to an artist: to the left are Mark Cazalet and Timothy Hyman, to the right John Bartlett and Magnus Irvin. Cazalet is that rarity of the modern world, a religious artist who makes art that is worthy of the name. I haven’t liked all the things by him I’ve seen in churches, but this new work is oddly beguiling when at its most painterly. (The more graphic interpretation of the seven vices and seven virtues is less convincing to my mind.) His determination to recognise beauty wherever he can find it is immensely heartening. For those who have eyes to see it, it is here in a puddle, or reflected in the windows of an abandoned car, in a breaker’s yard, or in the wasteland and stilted overpass of the Westway. His most poignant image is of one of those flimsy blue-and-white striped carrier bags pirouetting in midair beside a tower block. Hyman, by contrast, is a humanist painter of great power and sophistication who has anatomised midlife hell in three major paintings, which freely mingle ideas and topography. Of these, two in particular hold the eye. ‘What Remains’ is about the defeat of the Left, an intellectual massacre which is also a kind of bonfire of the vanities witnessed by an oddly assorted crowd including Hitler, Marx, Freud and Gandhi. In ‘The Stripping of London’, the city is personified as an old slapper on her back, like the whore of Babylon, being devoured by her greedy devotees.
Across the way are John Bartlett’s history paintings, again featuring the homeless (a sleeper menaced by an enormous flea, a triptych of sleeping bags and makeshift shelter), and a strange painting of a cloud of germs coming out of the Houses of Parliament. The latter operates as both a comment on chemical warfare and a warning about the noxious effusions of government. Satire is the mood of the moment in Magnus Irvin’s room, which is given over to his intricate cardboard installation, entitled ‘The Monument’. This castellated wonder offers a solution to all our problems: the idea is to attract all the unwanted elements of society on board this floating raft, tow it out into the North Sea and sink it. To this end Irvin has devised sideshows many and various to entrap the ghastly: ‘Bumtucks and Boobjobs’ for essential repairs is not far from ‘Beef and Grief’, the friendly burger bar which also serves as a funeral parlour after Mad Cow Disease has got you. A witty and inventive fate for all those undesirables who currently plague our otherwise ideal world ...
Walk out of Hell (if only it were so easy) and enter Heaven in the main room of the exhibition. Here is a generally more optimistic vision of London. Arturo di Stefano’s magisterial paintings of the South Bank and Waterloo, with their intriguingly distressed surfaces, present the positive face of the city: warmly human and awash with the poetry of place. He’s a fine painter, and it’s always a pleasure to see his work, but I can’t quite see where he fits into the dialectic. Ben Johnson’s cool architectural celebrations, however, are obviously heavenly — there aren’t any people in them. He deals with open corridors and exact reflections, with the deep reassurance of mathematical precision in a clean, well-lighted place. A kind of Utopia. Jiro Osuga’s Thames screen, grey skies on one side, blue on the other, has a nice sense of concertinaed space around the great unused highway which is London River. And Janet Brooke, having initially hated the skyscraper of Canary Wharf, has come to love it and make good art out of it. In a series of 36 relief prints (done in lino and card) echoing Hokusai’s famous ‘Views of Mount Fuji’, she depicts the tower in many moods and from many angles. A witty, refreshing and rather beautiful sequence, and a good place to leave the argument over our ultimately tendentious modern city.
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