The now and again Five Pieces of Art thing feature again. Well why not (again)? Again and again (and again and again), all this art flowing past on various feeds or wrapped up in press releases or jumping off actual gallery walls or wrapping chips or passing on the side of those Whitechapel white vans. So we ask (again) why not five pieces of art every couple of weeks or so alongside everything else that appears on these fractured pages on a daily basis? Can you think of one good reason why not to? Well besides the time involved and the this and the that and the dancing around and the skins on the tins of paint and the man at the door…
Five pieces of art then, a semi regular feature, just five pieces of art that have passed our way in the last few days, nothing more (or less) than that. Nothing really to do with an upcoming show or anything else (although maybe they are), just a simple, semi regular five pieces of art feature. Let’s do it again…
1: A Couple of Tim Fawcett paintings that currently feature in Mixtape No.8, the most recent online group show from Cultivate. “Tim Fawcett is a painter, originally from Cambridge, studied Fine Art at Sunderland and Cambridge with a brief spell in Brighton where he continued to paint and exhibit whilst freelancing as an architectural designer. He moved to the Isle of Wight, UK in 2016, in order to commit to his practice full-time”. We just like liek the economy of the marks he makes, gis ability to know when to stop working on a painting…
2: Really not going to write loads about this Eddie Martinez painting, Timothy Taylor gallery are showing it at some globe-trotting art fair somewhere in the world this month and Martinez is currently featured at La Biennale di Venezia 2024 with a solo presentation for the Republic of San Marino. None of that matters, the paint does the talking, the paint, the shapes, the way the paint is worked, “In Bufly No. 39 (Last Line) (2023), Martinez injects his personal iconography infusing an abundance of texture and colour into the painting. The work pictures the artist’s signature recurring butterfly motif from his “buflies” series, which he started in 2021, reflecting the joy and brightness that pervades his practice”
3: This is more from the last day of Susie Green‘s show at Union Gallery here in East London when I finally got to have the space to myself for fifteen playful minutes, it was one of those shows that demanded peace and quiet,,,
4: Park Seo-Bo and a piece that is just beautifully crisp, Ecriture No.090711 (2009), and this particular page is about nothing more than just enjoying a piece or two of art.
“Widely considered one of the leading figures in contemporary Korean art, Park Seo-Bo is credited as being the father of the ‘Dansaekhwa’ movement. Born in 1931 in Yecheon, Gyeongbuk, Park was part of a generation that was deeply affected by the Korean War (1950–53) which divided the country into North and South. After experimenting with Western abstraction, particularly the style of ‘Art Informel’ with which he became familiar during his time in Paris in 1961, Park began to explore a more introspective methodology that had its origins in Taoist and Buddhist philosophy and also in the Korean tradition of calligraphy.
Park was best known for his ‘Ecriture’ series of paintings. Initiated in the late 1960s, the ‘Ecriture’ series embraced this spiritual approach and were inextricably linked to notions of time, space and material, concepts which underpinned all of the artist’s work. In the early works, Park used repeated pencil lines incised into a still-wet monochromatic painted surface, and the later works expanded upon this language through the introduction of hanji, a traditional Korean paper hand-made from mulberry bark, which is adhered to the canvas surface. This development, along with the introduction of colour, enabled an expansive transformation of his practice while continuing the quest for emptiness through reduction.” (White Cube)
5: Those Jo Messer paintings that stood out at Frieze London 2024. Yes, they have been mentioned on these pages a number of times now but hey, here’s some footage from 56Henry booth that was sneaked when no one was looking and those layers do need to save to returned to now and again…
And as we said in the Frieze London 2024 review…
An offering presented by 56 Henry – that’s the gallery name, it makes you think of Hoxton’s No Parking don’t it, or that place way out in that vast building in Leytonstone where that lens based artist had that show, Photos of Other People’s Photos, you know the place, that one time car repair shop still covered in oil stains, that place where Bethany the Gallerina worked (that William Boyd was on about). Anyway, 56 Henry are presenting Jo Messer and all those layers of narratives, her blurring, is that the Last Supper in there in the layers of beautiful colour that I can’t photograph, the line between, hang on – “The artist will present three new works; two triptychs and a polyptych. Panels in disparate colours will be strung together, each one echoing the last as the figures blur into a frenzied abstraction” – I added the u to colors there just so it reads properly, don’t come over here dropping your letters from the King’s English. I love these pieces, I love that I can’t quite see where one ends and the next one starts, that the layers needs to be searched through, that the lines are delicious, that bodies are implied, many things are implied, so much in there, nothing obvious… This is the thing about Frieze, whatever you or indeed I might be thinking about the whole thing, whatever we might be thinking, there’s always something, there’s always several things, there almost always enough art to make it worth the time and effort and yes there’s whole debates to have, I’ll do that tomorrow, right now I still have Jo Messers big pieces in my head, I have those layers, I still have Peter Uka’s brilliant people paintings of Lady May and the others, I have that blackness of Lee Bae, that Lee Bae sculpture is so powerful, his charcoal… love these Jo Messer pieces, love the layers, my photos are rubbish, they’re far more alive than any photos will have you believe they are. Those Jo Messer pieces really stood out, had to go back for more on the Friday, had to spend more time just looking at them, there’s real guts here…”
You can still explore Mixtape No.8
THE ORGAN 
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