Kehinde Wiley‘s Fragments from the treasure house of darkness is currently at Cork Street’s Stephen Friedman Gallery, Kehinde Wiley’s first solo exhibition in London in three years following The Prelude at The National Gallery and last seen with those rather compelling rather big pieces in The Place I Am, a rather powerful group show at this very gallery at the end of last year – ORGAN THING: The Place I Am opens at Cork Street’s Stephen Friedman Gallery. A group show featuring Deborah Roberts, Leilah Babirye, Anne Rothenstein, Caroline Coon and more, art very much excites… and we need to catch up with some housekeeping before the month is over and done with – Wiley’s show is on until 9th November and who are all these people? Whoever they are, they certainly look interesting, they look cool, they look very now. A series of sixty paintings inspired by historic miniature portraits that first appeared in European royal courts in the sixteenth century, it is a challenging way to present these faces (and does it echo those Peter Uka paintings presented at Frieze London? Probably not intentionally so, nevertheless…). These small paintings, these bright paintings are extremely likeable and that often overused (way way way to overused, annoyingly overused) word ‘vibrant’ is for once the right one. It is a lot about scale, it is about the many paintings all on the wall at once and the shear, well power isn’t quite the right way of seeing it, they pull you in but it isn’t about power, more about the intrigue maybe? Well maybe not the power of the painting, maybe in what they’re saying though? I like the way we’re being questioned here in the posh part of London.

“In this exhibition, Wiley extracts “a sense of the heroic” from Nigeria, where the artist met each of his subjects on the same day at the University of Lagos. From sitters donning streetwear to those in traditional West African dress”. These are meticulous paintings, intriguing paintings, who are these people? What are their stories? Turning art history around, questioning who should be at the forefront of contemporary culture? Challenging and reinterpreting or simple just very fine paintings interesting people? The notion of “self-invention and magic of being young and hip on the streets of West Africa” – it does feel hip, it does feel right, it does feel good, you do have to admire the visual vocabulary, the application of that visual vocabulary, the stylistic references and for once just the beautiful slickness of it all, the blurring of quite a few boundaries between quite a few traditions and those contemporary ways…  Kehinde Wiley‘s Fragments from the treasure house of darkness is on right now at Stephen Friedman Gallery, 5–6 Cork Street, London, W1S 3LQ. The exhbition is on until 9th November 2024.

And we are trying to catch up…

And we are trying to catch up, there’s a whole load of photos and scribbled notes from the Cork Street and Frieze London’s West End Night, we have already covered some of it, we did need to cover Kehinde Wiley‘s show though and yes, we are once again cherry picking from that night that saw the excellent new Ken Currie show open as well as the powerful Peter Buggenhout exhibition at Holtermann right over the street from the big Stephen Friedman Gallery. Some of the galleries didn’t quite do whatever ‘it’ is and we’ll quietly move on without feeling theneed to say anything. And there was that rather intriguing Dillwyn Smith exhibition at Kearsey & Gold back up at the top end of the street at number 19 where we did find a certain amount of uncertainty and yes, a a world of perfect imperfection. The work of Dillwyn Smith (b.1958) does appear to exist in a world of perfect imperfection and yes i am going to borrow from the gallery statement, I told you, I’m catching up here and it kind of catches you off guard in there, you’re not quite sure at first as to what you’re looking at, you’re almost fooled, i kind of like that – “His visual style thrives on subtle contradictions—geometric yet fluid, solid yet translucent, structured yet never static. He calls them placebo paintings; “they are paintings without paint” – a paradox that only deepens their intrigue to the discerning eye” – I wasn’t sure, were they painted? Dyed? At first I was sure they were painted strips of fabric but this was, in my defence, after hours and hours of looking at paintings at Frieze as well as Cork Street where I had been to about a dozen galleries before this one. it appears fabric is the medium and colour is the language, I’d love to be able to un-see all this so I could walk in again for the first time, mind cleared, viewed afresh without all the hundreds and thousands of piece of art I has already seen that week. 

“For Dillwyn, fabric is the medium and colour is the language. All he asks of the viewer is time: time to look, to see through every layer, every bar and every shadow, to feel the illusions, bursts of colour, and rays of light that give his work its pulse”. And it is to be looked though, it does play with you, front or back? Safe beside yourself? Engaging and engaged, clean cut colour, hand cut imperfection, I like this, I don’t know what to believe in here, am I being played, it does all feel very human as we cherry pick our way through the galleries of the street’ Love the depth here, or the depths, and yes, “where what we thought we saw transforms upon closer inspection, drawing us deeper into the very fabric of the artwork – both literally and metaphorically”. 

Big, bold, bright, almost see though, skeleton canvas stretchers, are we looking at the front or the back, through the front to the back,  everything is back to front, is it that nylon stuff from the 70s? The one time textile designed in m should know, Brentford Nylons? I really really like this show, I really like these pieces all together like this, , I really like these questions, these challenges, I really like explore and find unexpected things like this… Must go back 

Dillwyn Smith, In Praise Of Love is at Kearsey & Gold, 19 Cork Street, London, W1S 3LP, until 10th November 2024. The gallery is open Tuesday through to Saturday,11am until 6pm (5pm on Saturdays) 

Alejandro Ospina, Algorithms/Magical Thinking at Upsilon Gallery – there’s a healthy body ofmulti-media works by Italian-American artist Osvaldo Mariscotti upstairs at Upsilon that are worth seeing but that’s not why we’ve taken in one more gallery that we really need to this evening (I do seriously think I saw of 5000 pieces of art in the living breathing flesh during Frieze week, way way too much to objectively tell anyone about any of it) and well, even though that show title, Algorithms/Magical Thinking, is awful (awfully off-putting?), I did want to catch this opening night while we were in the immediate area. I mean, one more gallery, can it hurt? Can you look at too much art, can you cross a line? Probably not one of Alejandro Ospina’s lines down in the basement of the gallery where a very annoying crowd of people are making it difficult to see what’s on the walls.  

The exhibition, so we’re told “showcases works from two of Ospina’s ongoing projects, Algorithms and Magical Thinking, highlighting the artistic evolution from the earlier series into the latest body of work. This seamless transition reveals the conceptual and visual development that bridges both projects, offering a compelling exploration of contemporary digital culture”. That really is an awfully off-putting show title, you need to try and park it before you look at this colourful body of rather mutated work, before you peel back or maybe look through or around those layers and the high-speed information he’s firing at you. Alejandro Ospina, a London-based Colombian artist, talks of Gorky, Miro, Mondrian, Poussin, Kandinsky and yes it is all there on his sleeve, his Kandinsky touches are a big reason for this one last gallery on a night when we’ve seen way too many pieces of art, I do like his mark making, the almost but not quite innocence of it all that he almost achieves, the (search for an) unhindered moment, the playful juxtapositions of those moments and while we try to catch up and before the moment or even the month has gone, I shall park this here with a view to going back before the exhibition closes.

Upsilon Gallery is at 64 Grosvenor Street, London, W1K 3JH – Both the shows at the gallery, Osvaldo Mariscotti upstairs  and Alejandro Ospina are on until 16th November   

As always, do please click on am image to see the whole thing or t orun the slide show…