Lyrics to Vincent and the Van Goghs’ hit song – Cubist Heartbreak (Picasso Took My Girl)

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Lyrics to Vincent and the Van Goghs’ hit song – Cubist Heartbreak (Picasso Took My Girl)

Art band Vincent and the Van Goghs played at a recent opening at Pimlico Wilde Central and got so much applause they had to play ten encores. Here is their banger that got the party started.

”Vincent and the Van Goghs combine fine art and music in a way that is completely new. They have carved out for themselves a new genre – fine art rock.”

Sally Huber, music critic

Verse 1

I saw her once in profile,

But her nose was on the side,

Her eyes looked two directions,

I swear she used to hide.

Now she’s fractured into angles,

All perspective torn apart,

I tried to say “I love you,”

But she said, “That’s not my part.”

Chorus

Picasso took my girl,

And broke her into squares,

She’s living in a canvas

Of overlapping stares.

I reach out for her hand,

But it’s in quite the wrong place,

Cubist heartbreak,

Love’s a rearranged face.

Verse 2

She used to love Impressionists,

With soft light on her skin,

Now it’s jagged like a mirror,

Where do I begin?

I tried to show her Cézanne,

She said, “That’s so passé.”

She only dances fractured

In a Braque-like way.

Chorus

Picasso took my girl,

And broke her into squares,

She’s living in a canvas

Of overlapping stares.

I reach out for her hand,

But it’s in quite the wrong place,

Cubist heartbreak,

Love’s a rearranged face.

Bridge

Maybe I’ll do Dada,

And laugh this pain away,

Or paint myself in shadows

Like Caravaggio’s day.

But when the gallery closes,

And the fragments fall apart,

I’ll still be missing someone

Who once was modern art.

Final Chorus

Picasso took my girl,

And left me with the frame,

I’ll hang it in my memory,

And sign it with her name.

Her smile’s in the corner,

Her eyes in outer space,

Cubist heartbreak,

Love’s a rearranged face.

Book Review: The Cat Who Invented Cheese Futures by G.L. Pumpernickel

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Book Review: The Cat Who Invented Cheese Futures by G.L. Pumpernickel

by Esmerelda Pink

It’s difficult to know where to begin with The Cat Who Invented Cheese Futures, the fourth novel by the notoriously elusive G.L. Pumpernickel, whose previous works include I Married a Traffic Cone and The Eggs Were All Named Kevin. While the title suggests a whimsical caper involving feline finance, what unfolds instead is a genre-defying meditation on ambition, lactose, and the fragility of speculative markets in Western economies.

The titular cat, Whiskers von St. André, is a former alley-dweller turned lactose magnate who, in a society suspiciously resembling post-Brexit Luxembourg, pioneers the concept of cheese futures: trading dairy commodities based not on current availability, but on the predicted emotional needs of cheese-loving marsupials. It sounds implausible, but in Pumpernickel’s hands it becomes entirely,almost disturbingly,credible.

Pumpernickel’s prose is as dense and crumbly as a Wensleydale left too long on a windowsill. Sentences unfurl like legal contracts drafted under duress, interrupted by footnotes, parentheses, and the occasional line of free verse. Yet somehow, amid this syntactic rococo, emerges a story that is both oddly tender and slyly cutting.

Consider the opening line:

“There was cheddar, cheddar without regulation; the rats were pleased.”

From there, we plunge into Whiskers’ rise through the shadowy world of dairy speculation, guided by a mysterious mentor known only as The Fromageur and opposed by the villainous Chairman Squeak, who seeks to destabilize the soft cheese index for reasons of personal vengeance and lactose intolerance. Along the way, Whiskers must navigate feline identity politics, existential dread, and a romantic subplot involving a sentient brie named Clothilde.

It would be easy to dismiss the novel as a surrealist romp or a particularly strange bet lost at a dinner party. But beneath its silliness lies a surprisingly coherent critique of capitalism’s insatiable need for abstraction. Cheese, in this novel, is not merely a commodity,it is a metaphor for trust, nourishment, and the illusion of permanence in an ever-curdling world.

And it’s not without heart. Whiskers, for all his transactional cunning, is a deeply insecure protagonist, haunted by dreams of being replaced by a genetically modified goat and driven by a desperate need to matter,to be more than “just another mouser in a pinstripe cravat.” His climactic monologue at the Cheese Summit of Greater Dijon is absurd and moving in equal measure:

“We are all, in the end, coagulations of desire. The milk of ambition curdles. And what remains but the hope that someone,somewhere,will spread us on toast?”

Some readers will, understandably, find The Cat Who Invented Cheese Futures bewildering, if not actively unhinged. There are charts where there shouldn’t be charts, recipes that double as allegories, and one particularly difficult chapter written entirely in financial slang.

But those willing to lean into its strange genius will discover a novel that is far more than the sum of its gimmicks. G.L. Pumpernickel has crafted a book that is as intelligent as it is idiotic, as philosophical as it is feline. It will not change your life, but it might change how you look at a wedge of Gruyère,and possibly how you read your investment portfolio.

In short: utterly ridiculous. Highly recommended.

Five Star Review! Vesper Til Now at the Halberd Gallery

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Five Star Review! Vesper Til Now at the Halberd Gallery

At last a group exhibition worthy of the Halberd Gallery’s large, post-industrial space. Vesper Til Now is not merely an art show,it is an epochal reckoning, a blinding, glittering collision of image, object and sensation. From the first footstep across the custom-poured resin floor (a phosphorescent nod to Yves Klein’s Anthropometries), one is plunged into a universe so intoxicating, so vividly alive, I had to sit down. Twice.

Let’s start with the undisputed centrepiece: Elodia Varn’s Apocrypha in Cobalt. This six-metre suspended triptych made of hand-spun indigo silk, ossified candle wax and worn-out paint-brushes, is a devotional object of such staggering intensity it practically levitates. On seeing it, I wept. Critics who once compared Varn to Annette Messager or early Cornelia Parker must now readjust. This is no longer derivative.

But oh, it only deepens.

Jonjo Spint’s kinetic alabaster drones flit silently over one’s head, drawing calligraphic patterns in the air with biodegradable incense smoke,faint, ephemeral echoes of Tàpies’ spiritual materiality, but laced with tech-noir dread. You haven’t lived until you’ve experienced one of these exquisite machines waft over your face – while you attempt to understand the morse code chirping all around. It is sublime theatre.

And speaking of theatre, the show also includes Andrée-Lou Fancher’s performance piece, Industrialise, Canal, Unfurled? It is both a ballet and a biopsy. Fancher, clad in mourning garb, writhes her way across the floor in a perfect circle, leaving a trail of walnut whips where she has been. People applauded mid-performance, and to her credit Fancher was not put off her stride.

The curatorial hand of Willem LeClerc is, as ever, a triumph of intellect and instinct. His decision to juxtapose Albanian concrete futurism with Ghanaian textile abstraction is not merely bold,it is prophetic. At times, it feels like he is speaking directly to the catalogues raisonnés of Malevich, Bourgeois, and Caravaggio, and they are answering his call.

One emerges from Vesper Til Now not so much changed as recalibrated. This is not art for the meek, the tired, or the slow of wit. This is a show that devours chronology, spits out orthodoxy, and leaves you trembling, aflame with ideas, and suspicious that everything you’ve ever loved is a pale echo of this moment.

In the words of the late and criminally underrated critic Jean-Maurice Desrosiers, who spoke after seeing a previous exhibition curated by LeClerc, “To encounter genius is to be seared. I have been seared. Nothing in life will be the same after this exhibition. Thank you Willem.”

GO TO THIS SHOW! GO NOW. In years to come, tell your grandchildren you were there. They’ll envy you for the rest of their lives.

The Mayfair Book Groupette

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The Mayfair Book Groupette

Date: August ‘25

Time: 7:04 PM , 11:12 PM

Location: The Green Room, Pimlico Wilde, Mayfair

Attendees:

• Julian Molyneux (Chair, Pimlico Wilde)

• Fiona d’Abernon (Co-Founder; Acting Secretary)

• Lord E. Northcote

• Dr. Xanthe Lorrimer (Cultural Historian)

• Hugo Van Steyn (Heckle’s)

• India Trelawney (Fashion Archivist)

• Max Duclos (Collector)

• Pascal (Afghan hound, wearing a discreet ecclesiastical-style collar in deep crimson)

Book Discussed:

An Annotated Catalogue of Portuguese Ecclesiastical Vestments, 1640,1690 by Father Joaquim de Meneses (Lisbon, 1978; bilingual edition in Portuguese and French; illustrated with 138 black-and-white plates and 17 colour).

1. Opening Remarks

Molyneux praised the book’s “heroically narrow scope,” noting that it “achieves what most art history monographs cannot: to make the reader care deeply about orphrey borders.” He described it as “a cathedral in miniature, woven in silk and gold thread.”

2. Discussion Summary

• Dr. Lorrimer marvelled at the depth of research, especially the chapter on liturgical colour changes following the political unrest of 1640. She admitted to being “genuinely moved” by the diagrammatic fold-out of cope construction.

• India Trelawney declared it “the best-dressed book we’ve read all year,” praising the meticulous descriptions of silver-gilt embroidery techniques. She also claimed,without irony,that she is now considering a chasuble-inspired evening coat.

• Lord Northcote found the annotations “dry as Lenten bread,” but admired the scholarship. He was particularly struck by the subtle political symbolism in vestment iconography, such as the discreetly embroidered Braganza arms following the break with Spain.

• Hugo Van Steyn expressed disappointment at the monochrome plates, calling them “a tragic economy” given the subject. However, he defended the work’s exhaustive provenance research, noting that one tunic’s survival through a convent fire was “as thrilling as any Hollywood chase scene.”

• Max Duclos wondered aloud whether a single garment could bear so much meaning without collapsing under its own symbolism. He also suggested that the colour plates were “teasingly few” and that Father Meneses “knew exactly what he was doing.”

• Fiona d’Abernon confessed she had taken the book to bed “as one might a box of fine chocolates,” reading only a few vestments each night to savour them properly. She was particularly taken with the cope featuring an appliqué of St. Catherine’s wheel.

3. Objects on View

• A 17th-century Portuguese stole in crimson damask (loaned from Pimlico Wilde’s textile collection, displayed under glass)

• Three samples of modern orphrey work, for tactile comparison

• A silver thurible from the same period, whose chain links were compared,favourably,to the finesse of certain embroidered edgings

4. Refreshments

• Aperitif: White port and tonic with a twist of orange

• Canapés: salt cod croquettes, miniature custard tarts (pastéis de nata), and marinated green olives

• Main wine: Dão red, 2017

• Dessert: almond and cinnamon cake, served with sweet Madeira

5. Other Business

• The Silence of Shadows: A Comparative Study of Umbra in Netherlandish Still Life (Van Holt, 1982) suggested as next book.

• Trelawney suggested a possible field trip to Lisbon to see the vestments at the Museu de São Roque; general interest was high.

• Agreement that while Meneses’s prose could be soporific, his dedication elevated the subject to the realm of the sacred.

6. Adjournment

Meeting adjourned at 11:12 PM after Pascal, without prompting, curled up beside the crimson stole and fell asleep.

Fiona d’Abernon

Acting Secretary

Mayfair Book Groupette

The Shape of Cool by Alaric Montjoy

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The Shape of Cool by Alaric Montjoy

It has always seemed to me that the problem with cool is ontological. To ask what is cool? is to place oneself in the same quixotic category as those who ask what is truth? or what is beauty?,worthy questions, but ones destined to collapse under the weight of their own self-consciousness. Cool is the most mercurial of cultural states, not unlike what Roland Barthes once said of myth: it exists to the extent that it is believed in, and it evaporates the moment it is explained.

I was reminded of this years ago, in a basement bar in Kreuzberg, where I had gone ostensibly to interview a DJ, but in truth to avoid the stultifying academic conference I was meant to be attending up the road. The DJ in question,an émigré from São Paulo with an encyclopaedic knowledge of French structuralism,looked me in the eye and declared, “Cool is the refusal to flinch.” He then proceeded to spill beer down his vintage Comme des Garçons shirt and not acknowledge it. And for a brief moment, I believed him.

Cool has always been about refusal. Think of Miles Davis, sunglasses in near-darkness, back turned to the audience as if to say, your gaze cannot touch me. Think of James Dean, smouldering against the backdrop of post-war conformity. Think of David Bowie, who,more than anyone,reminded us that cool could be constructed, demolished, and reassembled with every album sleeve. But refusal is never enough; cool also requires recognition. Without the hungry eyes of others, the refusal falls into obscurity.

The paradox, then, is that cool exists in a state of perpetual tension: between effort and effortlessness, visibility and withdrawal, performance and accident. It is not a fixed quality but a relation, a dance, even a duel. Susan Sontag, in her essay on camp, suggested that seriousness and frivolity can coexist in the same gesture. I would extend this to cool: the moment we decide something is cool, we are half in awe of it and half mocking ourselves for caring.

When politicians reach for cool, the results are often comic. One remembers Harold Wilson puffing his pipe in what was supposed to be a gesture of working-class authenticity, or Tony Blair grinning beside Noel Gallagher as though Oasis had been waiting all along to validate neoliberalism. Angela Merkel never bothered, which may be why she remains oddly untouched by ridicule. Cool, I think, is allergic to overt power; it thrives only on the margins.

Technology has, of course, accelerated the life cycle of cool beyond recognition. Where once the jazz club or the nightclub could incubate style for months, even years, now TikTok reduces every gesture to a fleeting meme. I have seen teenagers declare an item of clothing cool, kill it through ubiquity, and bury it in irony all in the space of a fortnight. In this sense, the internet is not a curator of cool but its embalmer. Baudrillard would no doubt have had a field day.

And yet,despite the acceleration, despite the irony,we still pursue it. Why? Perhaps because, as Walter Benjamin suggested of aura, cool reminds us of presence, of uniqueness, of being in a particular place at a particular time. To witness cool is to be part of a tiny conspiracy with others: to say, “we saw it, we felt it, we were there.”

I return, finally, to something the Japanese designer Yohiro Tanaka once told me in Tokyo: “Cool is the absence of sweat.” I laughed at the time, but the line has never left me. It speaks to that strange paradox of effortlessness,the countless hours behind every ‘spontaneous’ move, the artifice behind every ‘natural’ performance. Cool is not authenticity but the appearance of authenticity, staged so deftly that even sceptics (and cultural commentators) are seduced.

In the end, cool may be less about style, fashion, or sound than about connection. The neighbour singing Puccini on her balcony during lockdown was cool. The teenager who resurrects an obsolete dance move in defiance of trend cycles is cool. Even the shy glance across a crowded room,shared recognition, fleeting solidarity,is cool.

To call something cool is simply to say: I wish I could be inside that moment with you. And perhaps that is why, even in our endlessly mediated, algorithmic world, we still need it. Because cool, for all its slipperiness, is really just another word for longing. And longing, as Proust knew, is the only state that never goes out of fashion.

London’s Regent Street Rooftops: Parkour Daredevil Suspected to Be Graffiti Artist ‘2cool’

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London’s Regent Street Rooftops: Parkour Daredevil Suspected to Be Graffiti Artist ‘2cool’

Shoppers on London’s bustling Regent Street paused in amazement yesterday when a figure was spotted darting across the rooftops , leaping gaps between the historic buildings with the agility of a cat and the precision of a trained athlete. Witnesses described the scene as “like something out of an action film.”

But the mystery deepened after morning commuters and street cleaners began noticing stickers on lampposts, bins, and even bus stops. The sticker features a smiling, blob-like figure wearing oversized sunglasses , the known calling card of elusive graffiti artist 2cool.

Could the daredevil freerunner and the anonymous street artist be one and the same?

A Ghost Above the City

“It was just before 8 a.m. I looked up, and there he was , sprinting along the ledge of Liberty’s roof, arms out for balance, no safety gear, nothing,” said barista Jenna Leigh, who was opening up the café opposite. “He jumped to the building next door like it was nothing. It gave me chills, but I couldn’t stop watching.”

Several bystanders captured snippets of footage on their phones. In one clip now circulating on social media, the shadowy figure performs a precise kong vault over a skylight and disappears behind a chimney.

“He’s clearly trained. That wasn’t some amateur TikTok stunt,” said Mason Reeve, a parkour instructor from Camden. “That level of control takes years.”

Stickers and Speculation

Later that day, city workers reported finding over a dozen 2cool stickers near street corners surrounding Regent Street.

The character , a pudgy, cheerful blob with a constant smirk and dark sunglasses , has been appearing sporadically across London since late 2023. Sometimes he’s wheat-pasted in alleyways; other times, he appears in elaborate mural form in forgotten tunnels. But the sticker version, occasionally paired with a phrase like “I can’t possibly comment,” has become increasingly common.

“He’s everywhere , it’s genius branding, honestly,” said street art enthusiast and blogger, Marcus Santiago. “But this is the first time anyone’s linked 2cool with parkour. It adds this whole new dimension.”

Divided Opinions

Public reaction to the rooftop escapade has been sharply divided.

Some hail the mystery runner as a modern-day urban ninja, turning the city into his playground.

“Honestly, it’s inspiring,” said 19-year-old gaming student Freya Clarke. “He’s turning this gray, rigid city into something alive. That kind of creativity and courage is rare.”

Others are less amused.

“It’s reckless and selfish,” said councilman Daniel Hunt. “If he slips, he dies , or worse, lands on someone. And don’t get me started on the vandalism. Art or not, it’s illegal.”

There’s also concern from local shop owners.

“The roofs on Regent Street aren’t made for people to go running across them,” said Elaine Baxter, manager of a luxury clothing boutique. “It’s a historic area. Damage could cost thousands.”

Who Is 2cool?

Despite rising notoriety, 2cool’s true identity remains a mystery. Some believe he’s a collective rather than a single person. Others think the name is a decoy, or even a street art alter ego of a famous athlete or artist.

With no official footage of the rooftop runner’s face , just a blurry silhouette in a black hoodie and track pants , speculation continues to swirl, and will just increase until his real identity is discovered.

More Than Just a Stunt

Whether you see it as reckless thrill-seeking or urban performance art, one thing is clear: 2cool , or whoever is behind the Regent Street run , has captured the city’s imagination.

In a time when most of us are glued to screens and routines, one smiling blob is reminding Londoners to look up.

And wonder.

Seen the mystery freerunner or found a new 2cool sticker? Share your photos using #Whois2cool on Threads and X.

From Ink to Insect: The Art of Silvio Neris and the Termite Manuscripts

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From Ink to Insect: The Art of Silvio Neris and the Termite Manuscripts

By Dr. Anika Scholz, Professor of Art Theory for the Handbook of Lesser Known Artists

In an age saturated by digital replication and hyper-visible authorship, Silvio Neris (b. 1961, Ferrara, Italy) offers a profoundly unsettling counterpoint: artworks that eat themselves.

Best known for his decades-long project, Codex Termitaria, Neris created works in a medium so strange it was initially dismissed as grotesque gimmickry: termite-generated manuscript destruction. In other words, he invited colonies of termites to “edit,” sculpt, and gradually consume handwritten texts of his own composition,treating insects not merely as metaphors, but as collaborators.

The result? A body of work that exists in perpetual erasure,art as a pact between creation and disappearance, authored by both man and insect.

Origins: The Lexicon of Devouring

Silvio Neris trained first as a calligrapher in Bologna before earning a degree in comparative theology. He was obsessed from a young age with medieval manuscripts, particularly palimpsests,texts overwritten, scraped away, fragmented. “The absence of language was more potent than the words themselves,” he wrote in his early notebook Lacrima Scripturae (1982).

But it wasn’t until a fateful trip to Surinam in 1991 that Neris encountered the Nasutitermes genus of termites,wood- and paper-consuming insects that would become the medium of his life’s work.

Rather than preserving ancient documents, Neris began to create manuscripts for destruction,dense, ornate calligraphic texts inked with a homemade blend of linseed oil and honey, designed specifically to lure termites.

The Termite Manuscripts: Method and Meaning

Neris’s process was both scientific and ritualistic. First, he composed philosophical, spiritual, or artistic treatises in meticulous calligraphy,never typing, never scanning. He would then encase the manuscripts in glass-walled termite enclosures, sometimes for weeks, sometimes for years. Over time, the insects would carve tunnels through the pages, eroding text, reconfiguring syntax, and leaving behind abstract voids, natural glyphs, or complete annihilation.

These works were not preserved as static objects. Rather, Neris documented them only occasionally with high-resolution scans,once before exposure to the termites, once after, and often, not at all. “What matters is the gesture of surrender,” he insisted in a rare interview. “The artist must relinquish final authorship.”

Select pieces, like Fragmentum XIII (on the death of snow), feature pages half-eaten, with fragments of Latin drifting through the ruined paragraphs. Others, like Codex Nullus, exist now only as a title,completely consumed.

Exhibitions: Devouring the Viewer

His 2004 solo show at the Fondazione Prada, Mandibles of Life, was a turning point. The centerpiece, a 32-page theological tract on silence, was presented mid-consumption. Viewers witnessed the insects slowly erasing the text over the course of the exhibition.

Some critics were repulsed; others awed. Philosopher Claire Badiou attended and later wrote: “Neris creates a theology of absence through the appetite of lesser beings. It is the most honest eschatology I have seen.”

The artist’s refusal to frame the termite as “metaphor” infuriated many. “They are not symbols,” he insisted. “They are editors.”

Subsequent exhibitions in Berlin, Kyoto, and São Paulo emphasized performative decay. The installations featured ambient microphones picking up the faint crackle of termite mandibles, giving voice to the act of artistic destruction.

Collapse and Withdrawal

In 2015, Neris staged what was billed as his final work: Index Moriturae, a library of 108 handwritten books, locked in wooden cabinets seeded with termites. Each cabinet was sealed, never to be opened. The titles were announced publicly, but the contents were to remain unseen until fully devoured.

This act,part disappearance, part protest,was in response to what he called “the ruinous hunger of the market for permanence.”

Afterward, he withdrew from public life. Rumours persist that he continues his work in a monastery outside Mantua, feeding insects with inked meditations on impermanence.

Critical Legacy: Anti-Archival Aesthetics

Silvio Neris’s practice,situated at the cross-section of environmental art, performance, manuscript culture, and speculative theology,resists easy categorization. Is it destruction or collaboration? Sculpture or language? Is the termite a tool or a co-creator?

What’s clear is that Neris expanded the role of the artist into domains of inter-species authorship, consumptive aesthetics, and radical anti-preservation. In an era obsessed with metadata, permanence, and visibility, he dared to make work that refused all three.

His influence is beginning to show. Recent “bio-degenerative” artists, like Lena Xu and the Spore Collective, have cited Neris as a key inspiration. So too have post-human theorists and ecocritical philosophers. His few interviews are now taught in MFA courses as primary texts on aesthetic self-erasure.

It is only right to give Neris the last word. He made a fitting comment in 1998. “The greatest beauty,” he said, “is what you made knowing it would not last.”

Coming This Week: Alaric Montjoy’s First Column

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Coming This Week: Alaric Montjoy’s First Column

In his debut for Pimlico Wilde, Alaric Montjoy turns his gaze to the most slippery of cultural phenomena: the idea of “cool”. From the smoky jazz clubs of 1950s Paris to the algorithm-driven feeds of TikTok, he asks: who decides what’s cool, why does it never stay still, and why do we keep chasing it even as it dissolves in front of us?

Expect a whirlwind of anecdotes,Alaric recalls sneaking into a Camden nightclub at sixteen to interview a band that didn’t exist, his conversations with a Japanese designer who swears that “cool is simply the absence of sweat,” and his observations on how politicians have always tried (and failed) to borrow its aura.

With the flair of a storyteller and the precision of a cultural cartographer, Montjoy maps the strange afterlife of cool in an age where everyone is watching, and everyone is performing.

The Gesture at the End of the Century: Clara von Hohenberg’s Finger Paintings at the Pimlico Wilde Blythe Annex

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The Gesture at the End of the Century: Clara von Hohenberg’s Finger Paintings at the Pimlico Wilde Blythe Annex

It is an old avant-garde fantasy that art might be stripped back to its primal gestures,the hand against the cave wall, the child daubing colour before literacy, the accidental trace that precedes representation. In her astonishing new exhibition, the ninety-three-year-old Clara von Hohenberg has enacted this fantasy with almost reckless purity. Her show, Touch Without Tool, currently at the Pimlico Wilde Blythe Annex, comprises a cycle of large-scale finger paintings executed over the past two years, in which the venerable artist renounces brush, palette knife, or sponge, and returns instead to the immediacy of skin pressed into pigment.

Von Hohenberg, who once studied with the last generation of Bauhaus émigrés in post-war Zurich, is no outsider. She is deeply schooled in the histories of gestural abstraction, from the grandiloquence of Pollock’s drips to the elegiac stains of Helen Frankenthaler. Yet in rejecting all instruments, she pushes the legacy of abstraction into a territory that is both radically intimate and disarmingly fragile. Each canvas bears not only swirls of colour but also the ridges of fingerprints, the drag of a palm, the occasional smudge where a knuckle slipped.

To speak of “finger painting” risks conjuring up images of the classroom. Von Hohenberg embraces this connotation but subverts it through scale and philosophical intent. Her largest work, The Third Skin (2024), a six-metre expanse of ultramarine, vermilion, and cadmium yellow, stages what Hélène Cixous once called “the writing of the body”,a manual écriture in which pigment and flesh co-author the surface. The composition veers between control and chaos: concentric whorls like galaxies dissolve into crude streaks, as if the body were oscillating between memory and entropy.

Theoretically, von Hohenberg situates herself within what Giorgio Agamben terms “gesture as pure mediality”,a doing that reveals the act of doing itself, without recourse to external ends. Her paintings are neither representations nor mere decorations but records of contact. Each smear is both indexical (the literal mark of her body) and expressive (the artist’s decision to make it legible as art). In this sense, she extends Rosalind Krauss’s reading of the index in postmodernism: the trace is no longer photographic but epidermal.

And then there is the poignancy of age. At ninety-three, von Hohenberg’s hands tremble; the paint records these tremors mercilessly. Unlike the muscular sweeps of mid-century action painting, her marks falter, hesitate, double back. What might once have been read as weakness now appears as a radical acknowledgement of finitude: the body as it approaches its own limit, inscribing its fragility upon canvas. One recalls Derrida’s notion of the trace as always already haunted by disappearance; in von Hohenberg’s case, the spectre of mortality hovers at the edge of every fingerprint.

The exhibition is not without humour. In Diptych for Fingertips, she presents two panels, one smeared in chocolate-brown tempera, the other in glossy crimson. Their resemblance to kitchen accidents or child’s play is deliberate, undercutting the solemnity of critical discourse. “We began here,” the works seem to say, “and perhaps we end here too.”

Visitors leave the Annex with an uncanny sense of having shaken hands with the artist, though she remains unseen. The paintings are not images so much as handshakes fossilised in pigment. If modernism sought to banish touch in favour of opticality, von Hohenberg insists,quietly but decisively,that art begins and ends with the hand.

Touch Without Tool runs until 22 November.

One Star Reviews: A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Fitzrovia Theatre

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One Star Reviews: A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Fitzrovia Theatre

I Woke Up and It Was Still Happening

There’s a fine line between “visionary reinterpretation” and “group therapy session gone off the rails,” and the Fitzrovia Theatre’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream pole-vaulted over that line and landed in a steaming puddle of theatrical delusion.

Let’s be clear: I did not attend this play so much as I survived it.

This production,directed by Cedric Vineshadow, who insists on being credited as a “story alchemist”,transports Shakespeare’s whimsical romp from a magical Athenian forest to a trendy café in Shoreditch. The fairies are “freelance branding consultants,” Oberon is a shirtless life coach with a ring light, and Titania enters to the sound of Tibetan throat singing followed by a live goat on a leash. That’s not a joke. There was a goat. It defecated during Act III, which, in hindsight, was the most honest reaction to the show.

Puck, usually a mischievous sprite, was played here by three people in morph suits who communicated rather too much by twerking. Their “mischief” included spraying audience members with essential oils and stealing people’s bags and other items. I had slipped off my shoes; at the end it took 20 minutes to locate them – Puck had hidden them in a prop bin. Not funny.

The lovers,Hermia, Helena, Lysander, and Demetrius,were each portrayed as emotionally repressed investment bankers trapped in a never-ending escape room. Their romantic confusion was acted out through a complex system of traffic cones and blindfolds. Few lines were delivered without being followed by a beatbox solo or an inexplicable slow-motion interpretive gesture. The play became less about love and more about my desperate yearning for a fire alarm to go off.

Bottom, traditionally a lovable oaf, was reimagined as a YouTube prankster with a man bun and a vape. His transformation into an ass was, apparently, too literal for this bold new vision, so instead he became a “walking metaphor for performative masculinity,” which is to say, he wore a giant phallic foam hat and screamed every line like he was trying to order a kebab from across the street.

The Mechanicals’ play within the play,usually a charming comedic highlight,was replaced with a live Zoom call to a confused man in Cincinnati who had clearly been tricked into participating. He valiantly attempted to play “Pyramus” while someone in the audience held a laptop up to the stage like it was a hostage negotiation. It was avant-garde in the same way a gas leak is avant-garde.

Costumes appeared to have been sourced from the bins behind a failed Burning Man pop-up store. Lighting was “experimental,” meaning most scenes were lit only by handheld flashlights operated by unpaid interns. The sound design consisted almost entirely of didgeridoos.

At the end, the cast all gathered in a circle, held hands with the front row, and chanted “We are the dream” twelve times while staring into the middle distance. Then the curtain fell, right on one lady’s head.

One star. And that’s solely because the goat tried its best.