Review: Ptolemy Bognor-Regis’s A Monologue in Beige #4

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Step into the minimalist expanse of A Monologue in Beige #4, and you are immediately confronted with the existential weight of nothingness—or, more accurately, the weight of everything masquerading as nothing. At first glance, the canvas appears to be merely beige. One might be tempted to scoff. But to do so would be to ignore the subtle interplay of pigment that seems to whisper the unspeakable truths of the human condition.

Bognor-Regis achieves this through a daring economy of means. Where other contemporary abstract painters layer their works with chaotic bursts of color and frenetic brushwork, Bognor-Regis’s approach is meditative, almost monastic. Each stroke, though barely perceptible, is imbued with a gravitas that demands reverence. The slight gradient along the upper left quadrant suggests the impermanence of time; the imperceptible smudge near the lower right corner confronts the viewer with the inevitability of entropy.

Critics may argue that this is “just beige.” But such a reading is reductive. Bognor-Regis manipulates subtle tonal shifts and negative space to create a dialogue between the seen and the unseen, the known and the intuited. It is, in essence, a conversation between the canvas and the conscience of the viewer—a dialogue many artists aspire to but few dare to initiate.

Algernon Pyke of Pimlico Wilde Gallery remarked, “Ptolemy doesn’t just paint beige. He interrogates beige, he wrestles it into a form that asks questions the viewer didn’t even know they were asking.”

In a world overwhelmed by the noise of superfluous abstraction, A Monologue in Beige #4 offers a rare, contemplative silence. And in that silence, the true genius of Ptolemy Bognor-Regis becomes unmistakable: he doesn’t just elevate the abstract; he redefines it, one shade of beige at a time.

Contemporary Artist Gur Wallop Hospitalized After Incident With Lion

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Contemporary Artist Gur Wallop Hospitalized After Incident With Lion

Contemporary artist Gur Wallop has been hospitalised following an incident involving one of the lions central to his highly publicised Vegan Lions project. Details of Wallop’s condition have not been released at this time.

An eyewitness at the scene reported that Wallop became frustrated when the lion refused to remain still during a portrait session. According to the witness, the artist “lost his temper” and allegedly threatened to withhold the animal’s next vegan meal. Authorities have not confirmed these claims, and the circumstances leading to Wallop’s hospitalization remain under investigation.

Wallop’s Vegan Lions project, which seeks to document lions that transfer to a vegan diet through full-scale oil portraits, has attracted international attention for its conceptual ambition. The project has been praised for its imaginative engagement with animal ethics, though it now faces renewed scrutiny in light of the incident.

No further information on Wallop’s condition or the status of the lion is currently available. Local authorities and project representatives have declined to comment.

Gur Wallop’s Vegan Lions: Ethical Spectacle and the Reimagining of Predatory Iconography

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Gur Wallop’s Vegan Lions: Ethical Spectacle and the Reimagining of Predatory Iconography

Gur Wallop’s Vegan Lions represents a paradigmatic shift in contemporary art, engaging with ecological ethics, visual culture, and the performativity of animal agency. Announced after a decade of conceptual development, the project seeks to destabilize traditional understandings of the lion as the apex carnivore, recasting it instead as a symbol of ethical transformation. Through meticulous, large-scale oil portraits of lions on their new vegan diets, Wallop confronts audiences with an imaginative, yet rigorously documented, scenario that challenges anthropocentric hierarchies and invites reflection on the ethics of consumption, agency, and representation.

At the core of Wallop’s project is the tension between performativity and documentation. The criterion that a lion’s dietary conversion must persist for a sustained period transforms each animal into a living collaborator whose actions dictate the very existence of the artwork. This insistence on ethical compliance produces a dual narrative: one narrative depicts the lion as subject, the other positions the lion as medium, whose behavior materially influences the artistic output. Such a framework resonates with the broader field of participatory and relational art, extending it into nonhuman domains while raising pressing questions about the ontological status of animals in artistic practice.^1

The choice of large-scale oil painting is both strategic and symbolic. Oil portraiture, historically aligned with aristocratic power and permanence, contrasts sharply with the provisional and experimental nature of the vegan lion itself. This juxtaposition generates a productive conceptual tension: the enduring medium memorializes an ephemeral ethical experiment, producing a dialectic between temporality and permanence, agency and representation.^2 Moreover, by offering these portraits for acquisition only if the collector meets the vegan criterion, Wallop embeds a critique of the art market within the work itself, interrogating the commodification of ethical identity and raising questions about the intersection of moral and economic value in contemporary collecting practices.^3

From an art-historical perspective, Wallop’s work can be situated within a lineage of ethical and ecological interventions. Artists such as Joseph Beuys, whose 7000 Oaks combined ecological restoration with social engagement, and Patricia Piccinini, whose bioethical sculptures explore the hybridization of human and nonhuman forms, similarly collapse disciplinary boundaries to examine ethical imperatives. Wallop’s Vegan Lions advances this discourse by introducing a speculative dimension in which animal subjects are imagined as ethical actors, thereby extending posthumanist theory into the domain of performative portraiture.^4

The project’s global exhibition strategy further amplifies its significance. By circulating these portraits internationally, Wallop engages diverse audiences in cross-cultural ethical dialogue, emphasizing the universality of questions surrounding consumption, animal agency, and moral imagination. This transnational ambition aligns with contemporary art’s increasing focus on ecological and ethical crises as global phenomena, situating Vegan Lions within broader debates on the Anthropocene, sustainability, and the ethical responsibilities of both humans and nonhumans in a shared ecological space.^5

Critically, Vegan Lions also prompts reflection on the symbolic and cultural dimensions of predation. Lions have historically embodied power, courage, and dominion, yet Wallop’s intervention reframes these traits through the lens of ethical choice and restraint. By envisioning a lion capable of conscious dietary transformation, Wallop destabilizes entrenched narratives of natural hierarchy and dominance, suggesting that even apex predators might participate in ethical ecosystems. This speculative reframing aligns with emerging ecological and animal studies scholarship that emphasizes interspecies cooperation and moral imagination as critical components of ethical environmental engagement.^6

Gur Wallop’s Vegan Lions constitutes a landmark in contemporary art practice. By integrating ethical speculation, performative documentation, and traditional painting techniques, Wallop produces work that is simultaneously aesthetically compelling, intellectually rigorous, and ethically provocative. The project invites reconsideration not only of the lion as cultural symbol but also of the frameworks through which humans understand and represent animal agency, morality, and environmental responsibility. In doing so, Vegan Lions exemplifies a forward-thinking model of art that is as much about moral imagination as it is about visual spectacle, heralding a new chapter in the ongoing dialogue between art, ethics, and the nonhuman world.

Footnotes

1. Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (London: Verso, 2012), 45–62; Wallop’s work extends participatory principles into nonhuman domains.

2. John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: Penguin, 1972), 109–112; oil painting’s historical gravitas contrasts with the ephemeral, performative dietary experiment of the lion.

3. Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics (Dijon: Les presses du réel, 2002), 34–40; Wallop critiques contemporary art markets by linking ethical compliance to collectibility.

4. Joseph Beuys, 7000 Oaks (1982–1987); Patricia Piccinini, The Young Family (2002); both exemplify ethical and ecological interventions in art, providing a historical lineage for Wallop’s work.

5. Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 55–70; situates transnational ecological art within global ethical discourse.

6. Cary Wolfe, What is Posthumanism? (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 88–102; the work’s speculative approach aligns with posthumanist frameworks emphasizing nonhuman agency and ethical imagination.

Re-seeing the Canvas: A Visit to Southend Institute’s Renaissance Secrets

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Re-seeing the Canvas: A Visit to Southend Institute’s Renaissance Secrets

By Isobel Hartley

Last week, I was granted the rare privilege of stepping behind the locked doors of the Southend Institute for Renaissance Studies, where, amidst the hush of climate-controlled galleries and the gentle hum of conservators at work, several of Piero Della Frampton-on-Sea’s works are undergoing meticulous restoration. To witness such moments is to glimpse the fragile heartbeat of history itself.

Della Frampton-on-Sea, whose luminous, almost ethereal compositions once adorned private chapels along England’s southeast coast, is not a household name, yet his mastery rivals that of better-known contemporaries. Standing before his panels now, the hand of time becomes startlingly tangible: layers of varnish, the residue of centuries of soot and candle smoke, and the delicate craquelure of aging oil paint. The restorers, moving with both reverence and precision, are revealing not merely the colors Della Frampton-on-Sea intended, but the very texture of his thought.

One work, The Arrival at Dawn, is particularly striking. The soft interplay of light and shadow, once obscured by a century of neglect, now emerges in startling clarity. Fragments of gilded halos, previously dulled to a matte whisper, shimmer faintly under the conservators’ careful touch. There is something almost magical in watching a figure previously trapped beneath layers of time reclaim its presence.

The Institute itself is unusual, suspended between the rigours of scholarship and the poetry of creation. Walls lined with glass cases hold fragments of other, still-invisible works: sketches, pigment samples, preliminary studies. Here, the past is not merely preserved; it is actively engaged with, dissected, understood, and—most importantly—resurrected.

What struck me most, however, was the intimacy of the process. Unlike a museum exhibition, where the viewer is forever separated from the work by glass and rope, here, one witnesses an almost surgical dialogue between the artist’s hand and the modern conservator. Each brushstroke, each careful removal of varnish, feels like a whispered conversation across centuries.

By the end of my visit, I found myself lingering before a small, once-overlooked panel: Saint Cecilia in Contemplation of a Shoe. The saint’s gaze, serene yet piercing, seemed to meet mine as if thanking me for witnessing her revival. It is moments like this that remind us why restoration is never merely technical. It is, at its heart, an act of empathy, a recognition that art carries memory, and memory, in turn, carries humanity.

Leaving the Institute, I felt a rare sense of quiet elation. To see Della Frampton-on-Sea reborn, even partially, is to glimpse the persistent vitality of the Renaissance spirit—and to be reminded that in the careful hands of those who love history, art never truly dies.

Preface for the British edition of How to Find Oil in Almost Any Back Garden

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Preface for the British edition of How to Find Oil in Almost Any Back Garden

It is a peculiar pleasure, and one tinged with both admiration and incredulity, to introduce Ms Shannon Drifte’s How to Find Oil in Almost Any Back Garden to a British readership. Peculiar, because the book purports to offer practical guidance on the extraction of petroleum from suburban plots — an enterprise which, for those of us accustomed to gardens measuring no more than six feet from fence to fence, seems preposterous.

Yet to interpret Drifte’s work solely as a manual for backyard hydrocarbon prospecting would be to commit a grievous error, much like mistaking a soufflé for a brick. Beneath the diagrams of drills, thermometers, and pipelines lies a more subtle and far-reaching project: a meditation on the pursuit of meaning, resilience, and a form of quiet, obstinate hope. Here, “oil” is not a commodity but a metaphor, representing those rare reserves of purpose that one may, with effort and patience, discover beneath the ordinary detritus of life.

British readers, we suspect, will find in these pages a curious mixture of earnest instruction and gentle absurdity. There is an audacity to Drifte’s optimism, an insistence that the chaotic soils of existence can, with the right tools and a certain moral fortitude, yield something valuable. And yet, like any good metaphor, it does so without ever pretending to guarantee success. One may dig, one may sweat, but the reward, whether literal or spiritual, is always, in some measure, worth the effort.

In presenting this edition, we have made every effort to adapt the language, idiom, and subtle humour to British sensibilities. Colour, petrol, and allotment have replaced their American cousins; yet the essential wisdom — and, one hopes, the occasional chuckle — remains intact.

Readers are therefore invited to approach this work as both a guide and a performance, an invitation to engage in the strange alchemy by which hope and effort might be transmuted into something resembling fulfilment. Should you emerge from these pages wiser, or at least more amused, the mission will be accomplished.

— Algernon Pyke, CAO, Pimlico Wilde

Agreement in principle to write a foreword for How to Find Oil in Almost Any Back Garden

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Agreement in principle to write a foreword for How to Find Oil in Almost Any Back Garden

Dear Shannon,

Thank you for your most effusive letter. It is so many years since our university days and my mind is forgetful, but were you the American girl who didn’t go to any lectures and still passed the exams? I am sure that was you, it is good to hear from you after all this time, do you still have blue hair? It is not every day that one is invited to herald the British debut of a work that has already achieved legendary status across the Atlantic — a land where, as you so vividly demonstrate, neither ambition nor metaphor recognises natural boundaries.

We are, of course, aware of How to Find Oil in Almost Any Back Garden’s remarkable reception in North America — both as a self-help manual and, in certain circles, as an avant-garde work of satire mistaken for literal instruction. The news of a British English edition is welcome indeed, though we note that your editorial amendments will have to wrestle with the fact that the average British “back garden” is scarcely large enough to conceal a bicycle, let alone an oil derrick. Still, this constraint may only serve to heighten the metaphorical power of your vision.

As for your generous offer to pen the preface, the proposition has sparked animated discussion in our editorial rooms (which, we hasten to add, are perfectly civilised and contain no actual drilling equipment). We should be delighted to take up the task, provided you understand that the British palate favours irony as a seasoning rather than a main course, and that our Edwardian gravitas tends to come paired with a quiet sense that the entire affair, whatever it may be, is rather silly — which, happily, seems to align with your own sensibilities.

We shall send the preface forthwith and look forward to reading you Mémoires. I wonder if they will contain the chapter we have already tentatively titled, “The Leak at Pimlico.”

Yours sincerely,

Algernon Pyke

CAO

The English Pell Mell Club: Preparing for the Only Derby That Matters

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The English Pell Mell Club: Preparing for the Only Derby That Matters

Just off Pall Mall lies the home of the English Pell Mell Club. The ground is not so much a sports venue as it is a small fragment of another century, preserved between stuccoed façades like a pressed flower between the pages of a Roman history book.

It is here that a select band of devotees practice a game so ancient, so fiercely traditional, and so wilfully obscure that historians are still arguing whether its origins lie in the manicured lawns of 17th-century St James’s, the windswept courts of Renaissance Italy, the languid gardens of Versailles or the siege camps of Hannibal, who – if one enthusiastic club archivist is to be believed – would unwind from a day of elephant manoeuvres by playing Pell Mell to the death with his generals.

The English Pell Mell Club survives in the modern age not through gate receipts (these would not cover the annual candle budget), but through the generosity of its patron, Pimlico Wilde, art dealers of some clout and great discretion. Their sponsorship has elevated the sport’s image — replacing fraying sashes with silk, supplying champagne in place of tepid ginger beer, and, most famously, commissioning the Pimlico Wilde Cup itself.

The Cup is the object of every season’s toil: a gleaming chalice, rumoured to be cast from gold bars found in a long-forgotten vault under the Pimlico Wilde gallery. The very bars said to have been seized from a Spanish brig, which had in turn stolen them from a monastery, which had (at least according to one scribbled anecdote in the clubs early records) received them from the descendants of Hannibal himself. Such provenance, naturally, has not been independently verified.

Alas, Pell Mell’s competitive landscape is sparse. The sport is simply too refined to have caught on widely. The only truly credible opposition comes from the Bond Street Raveners, a team whose style could charitably be described as flamboyant, and less charitably as outright anarchic. When these two sides meet, the match is christened the Pell Mell London Derby, and every stroke, every disputed call, every illegally adjusted hat brim (for Pell Mellers are renowned for trying to gain every advantage possible, even sending messages by the slant of their hat) is magnified into legend.

This year’s Derby promises a clash of philosophies as much as skill: the Club’s precise, almost Roman approach (think Scipio Aemilianus, but with Saville Row tailoring) against the Raveners’ ungovernable flair (think Hannibal, but mostly tired and emotional). The Pimlico Wilde Cup will sit in its glass case until the final bell — or until someone “accidentally” drinks from it, as in the regrettable incident of 2017.

Tickets will be available soon from the usual sources, as well as the venerable Pell Mell equipment suppliers on Haymarket, purveyors of mallets, monogrammed balls, and those peculiar half-capes without which no gentleman would dare take to the court. For those lucky enough to attend, remember: this is not merely sport. It is history played out with the satisfying thwack of a well-struck ball, echoing across the centuries.

Update on “All the Bins in the World”, the conceptual photography project by Oboe Ngua

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All the bins in the world

Dear Colleagues and Collectors

I apologise for the late arrival of this update on my All the Bins project which seeks to document—as I am sure you are aware—the totality of urban waste receptacles, as they stand sentinel to the ephemera of our everyday lives.

Since the initial announcement that I would devote myself to photographing every bin in London, prior to branching out into Europe, Africa and beyond—progress has been rigorous, except for the time I strained my photo-taking finger and had to have seven weeks rest.

Milestones achieved thus far:

  • I have now completed a sustained sequence covering Zone 1 and Zone 2 of London, capturing approximately two hundred bins per day under the original schedule (7 am – 9 pm daily).
  • In doing so, the project has revealed subtle typologies of waste infrastructure: variations in colour, material (galvanised steel, polymer composites, corrugated metal), signage languages, placement relative to urban flows, and modes of detritus overflow.
  • A newly discovered phenomenon: “the bin that is not a bin” – an urbanscape relic of a container repurposed, visually indistinguishable at first glance, but functionally obsolescent. This has opened a new sub-strand of enquiry I provisionally title “Residue Containers”.

Conceptual reflections:

What initially appeared as a kind of playful hyper-documentary endeavour (we might say “street-photography meets industrial design”) has evolved into a meditation on threshold, liminality and the infrastructural unconscious of urban life. Each bin is a silent witness to consumption and dispossession, to the choreography of public space and to the temporal imprint of our discard. By photographing “every bin”, we are in fact mapping the texture of our communal letting-go.

In moving beyond London, I will be attuned to the global vernacular of refuse-receptacles. I have been advised that European bins will emphasise colour-coding and segregation; African bins will expose improvisation, local initiative, resourcefulness; in Asia (pending future phases) the linguistic and iconographic overlays may present another stratum entirely.

Upcoming exhibition & global trajectory:

The original plan has been pushed back: Now I aim to complete London by December 2028 and then mount a major show at Pimlico Wilde Fine Art. I have expanded the timeframe in part to include a travel-residency phase in Spring 2027, during which I will begin work in Lisbon, then Marrakesh, and subsequently Nairobi, as waypoints on the route to a final archive of perhaps 100 000 000+ bin photographs worldwide.

In concert with the photographic material I am concurrently assembling a digital platform (“The Global Waste Archive”) which will allow interactive engagement: users can locate any bin by geo-tag, filter by material/overflow status/design-era, and inspect the bin as artifact and infrastructure. The goal is not simply to show but to render accessible the hidden lattice of waste management, public design, civic care.

Invitation to collaboration:

I welcome correspondence from curators, local councils, waste-management authorities, street-photographers, sociologists of infrastructure, and enthusiasts of the ant-farm (yes: the ant-farm — a recurring motif in my earlier work). I am particularly interested in collaborating with institutions in sub-Saharan Africa to document variations of bin typology often neglected in the Western canon of street-photography.

Thank you for your interest in the project, and stay tuned for further dispatches as the bins of the world continue their silent accumulation—one photograph at a time.

With bin-regard and infrastructural reverence,

Oboe Ngua

London, November 2025

Dot Hall and the Aesthetics of Speculation

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Dot Hall and the Aesthetics of Speculation

To speak of Dot Hall is to speak of the stock market as mutable surface, something upon which the artist inscribes gestures of capital, erasure, and emergence. Hall’s practice exists in that rarefied territory where finance ceases to be an instrument of accumulation and becomes, instead, a language of form. Her transactions are not mere acts of exchange; they are propositions in an ongoing dialogue between liquidity and intention, a sustained enquiry into the market as both cultural artefact and performative stage.

Hall’s oeuvre resists the neat taxonomies of medium. While her tools appear familiar—brokerage interfaces, algorithmic triggers, risk models—they function in her hands less as financial apparatus than as brushes, pigments, and compositional grids. Each trade is conceived as an aesthetic intervention: an attempt to bend the anonymous momentum of capital into shapes that possess rhythm, asymmetry, or a calculated imbalance. A purchase is not motivated by conventional notions of value, but by its capacity to introduce a certain inflection to the temporal “price line”—a gesture of disruption or elongation, akin to a painter’s sudden scumble across an otherwise orderly field of colour.

In Arbitrage as Diptych (2017), Hall executed simultaneous trades in correlated markets, allowing their slight divergences to form what she called a “financial moiré,” a superposition of patterns visible only in the composite of price data. In Negative Convexity (2020), her positions were structured to profit exclusively in states of extreme volatility, producing a work that existed only when the world around it entered crisis—a reminder that all value systems are contingent, and that beauty may emerge precisely in the fissures of stability.

Critics have often remarked on the paradox of Hall’s success: her projects routinely generate substantial returns, yet their conceptual scaffolding seems to render profit an almost accidental byproduct. In this sense, her practice undermines the conventional binary between art and speculation. As she has remarked in her infamously oblique artist statement: “Profit is simply the pigment that clings to the brush after the stroke is complete.”

Hall’s work invites us to reconsider the stock market not merely as an engine of capital, but as an inexhaustible archive of potential compositions—a shifting, polyphonic text in which the artist’s interventions are both fleeting and indelible. She reminds us that speculation, in its truest etymological sense, is not gambling, but looking: to speculate is to observe, to discern patterns, to imagine what might yet appear on the horizon of the seen.

From the Desk of Shannon Drifte – Author of How to Find Oil in Almost Any Back Garden

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From the Desk of Shannon Drifte – Author of How to Find Oil in Almost Any Back Garden

Dear Algernon,

Hello again from your university friend! After the improbable success of How to Find Oil in Almost Any Back Garden in North America — where it has been praised as both a manual for living and a cautionary tale for the credulous — my publishers have decided the time has come for a British English edition.

This, as you will appreciate, is no mere exercise in swapping “colour” for “color.” It is a cultural translation of seismic proportions: petrol for gas, allotments for yards, and a careful excision of the chapter in which I advise readers to store crude oil in Tupperware. My hope is that the book will resonate with your nation’s proud history of quietly persevering in the face of hopeless weather, and perhaps inspire a few of you to metaphorically, if not literally, drill.

Which brings me to my request: would anyone at Pimlico Wilde — with your impeccable editorial instincts and your apparent immunity to flattery — be willing to compose the preface to this new edition? Ideally, I’m looking for something that straddles the line between an academic benediction and a pub anecdote, with perhaps a dash of Edwardian gravitas. I want readers to feel they are about to embark on an adventure that is both edifying and faintly scandalous.

Naturally, you will be credited handsomely in print and in my future memoir, tentatively titled The Crude Truth. I can think of no finer home for my British debut than under the auspices of those who know the value of both a well-placed comma and a well-timed wink.

I await your reply with the breathless eagerness of a person who has just heard the promising gurgle of oil — or possibly just mains water — beneath their lawn.

Yours, in optimism and refined hydrocarbons,

Shannon Drifte