I don’t know, more art? Can there be too much art? Finally got around to putting down brushes for an hour and walking over to the Billy Crosby exhibition in that no man’s land where Union Gallery is found. Four paintings, one on each wall, seems like an age since the last show in this space, that Paul McCarthy whisky-filled green butt plug show or whatever the hell it was back in the muddle or indeed the middle of Summer. Four Billy Crosby paintings then, a small white cube of a room, four identically sized 180x120cm paintings, one on each wall…
“Union Gallery is delighted to present The Meadow, Billy Crosby’s first major solo show in London”, is four paintings in a small front room of an East London terrace house a major show? I guess it is a respected space, I guess they think big at Union? A new series of paintings from the artist’s studio in south-east London and i set of paintings I’ve been meaning to get over and see since the show opened just before Frieze (which already seems like a lifetime ago), it did seem intriguing…
“The singular work of Billy Crosby intuitively connects the complex relation of painting to current global discourse around the subject of machine learning and its impact on socio-political and personal futures. Crosby guides us into this novel landscape by adopting ‘new tech’ as a natural partner in paint, quieting the hysteria surrounding AI and its potential consequences. Instead, Crosby offers a deeper painterly means to probe these concepts at the dawn of their realisation”
And well, as Turner once muttered, the camera will be the end of us all. AI? Do we have the time or indeed the inclination to go into it all today, the hole that is the whole AI debate?
“The Meadow signifies a gentle, liminal place of emergence; of rest and threshold, wildness and openness. It implies a context of entangled life, diverse intelligences and larger patterns”. Billy Crosby
Four paintings that have you in a spin from one to the other in the small room. A meadow, a literal setting as well as an inner or psychic terrain, a real life encounter with the fruits of Crosby’s lived experience filtered through a recursive dialogue with generative AIs and LoRA diffusion models trained on the artist’s previous work. And who amongst us, as artists, hasn’t been curious enough to do just that, to see what AI might do with our art? Billy Crosby’s embracing of the technology is maybe as obvious as it is interesting, Iwonder what this show will look like in four or five years? I guess it is about what AI has to play with in the first place (to state the bleedin’ obvious), in this case some kind of here and now psychedelic perspective, some kind of notion that painting, photography and AI image generation all occupy the same space in terms of the final image made, if indeed there is ever a final image rather than an ever evolving one? It is hard not to like these four pieces, these four paintings that dare I say, do kind of look like the front covers of rather middle class children’s books as much as anything else. Four paintings that could be book pages, they’re cute, they’re nice. I was curious about this show before hand, standing in here now, alone with these four paintings, as much as they are an escape for fifteen minutes or so, I’m not sure, with everything going on right now outside these four walls, out there in real real life, I’m not sure how much I want nice cute things right now however intriguing the idea of “the strange machine fallibility of AI with the sympathetic human fallibility of the hand” might be….
Here’s another #43SecondFilm…
‘Motifs of biological mimicry and artificial emergence run throughout the work. Forms suggestive of mycelium, neural net structures and symbolic architectures flicker in and out of legibility…’
And back out there in the real real world, back out on the street, past the graff and the tags and the broken beggars and the traffic and the buses and well, it was fifteen minutes of cute painting wrapped up in a debate about where we’re all going with AI. AI accused me of being complicate the emergence of Oasis the other day, AI is not to be trusted, as for what it did with my art, well, no, that wasn’t right either.
Another walk, this time a walk over to wherever the Canalboat Contemporary is this week, same place as it was last week actually (and the week before), things have stopped moving. The weekly shows in the box on the side of the boat go on, the boat hasn’t hasn’t really moved for weeks, there’s been no one there and no one really looking the last few times I’ve been there, no sign, no sin of life on a busy Sunday afternoon on the Hackney towpath, it all feels a little half-hearted, but hey, it all looks good on social media. Laurie Cole is in the box this week…
“Cornish artist Laurie Cole (b.1994) explores watery worlds and the deep ties between women and nature. Her work moves between the unruly and the contained, between wildness and the structures that seek to shape or restrain it. Using collage, found materials, rust, salt, and paint, Cole treats painting as an act of trespass and reclamation – breaking down boundaries to build a new sense of place”.
Here’s yet another #43SecondFilm…
I guess the art is a little restrained here in the box on the still water of the very still canal where what is described as her “delicate water inspired painting” is kind of lost behind the glass and well, I sit there for a few minutes, looking at the small pieces and watching people walk past and then well, off I walk as well. The so called Private View, if indeed there is anything ‘private’ about an opening night out on the very public towpath, looked like it was busy, I think I was distracted by a pile of rope that night, that and a load of rather polite squares… There was another canalboat further down that may have been engaging a tiny touch more… (sw)
Canal Boat Contemporary, last time I checked, could be found on the towpath by Broadway Market, Hackney, London E8 right now. The boat’s Instagram feed will keep in touch with the constant movement, canal rules mean a more is required every couple of weeks – Canal Boat Contemporary
Next on the boat: “We’re thrilled to announce that our next show in The Box is by the acclaimed American figurative painter Jennifer Pochinski. So many of you have already told me how much you admire her colour, line, and fearless paint handling – she has a serious fan base here, and for good reason”. The Boat is still on ther towpath on Regent’s Canal, by Hackney’s Broadway Market. The show starts on Wednesday 26th November, open 24/7 but there is a so called Private View betweek 6pm and 8pm on the 26th..
Actually before Jennifer, there’s a week of Liam Mertens in the box on the side of the boat opening tonight, tonight being 19th November.
Union Gallery is found at 94 Teesdale Street, London, E2 6PU. The gallery is open midday until 6pm, Thursday to Saturday. The Billy Crosby exhibition is on until 22nd November, 2025.
Other recent Union Gallery on these pages…
More recent coverage of the boat…
As always, do please click on an image to see the whole image or to run the slide show…
THE ORGAN 
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