Brighton: Culture on the Sea

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Brighton: Culture on the Sea

Few English cities wear their cultural identity quite so conspicuously as Brighton. To step from the station down the hill towards the sea is to enter a theatre of self-performance: a place where architecture, subculture and commerce intermingle with a kind of knowing theatricality. Brighton does not merely host culture; it stages itself as culture.

Its terraces, those pale crescents gazing at the Channel, speak of 19th-century aspiration,a seaside resort carefully engineered for leisure and display. Yet beneath this genteel façade runs a countercurrent of restlessness. The arrival of the railway in the mid-19th century made Brighton a playground for London’s masses, bringing with them both transgression and escape. Today, this tension between propriety and subversion persists, woven into the city’s fabric.

Nowhere is this duality clearer than along the seafront. The skeletal remains of the West Pier stand as a monument to impermanence, a rusted counterpoint to the gleaming i360 observation tower that looms nearby. Between them, buskers, skateboarders and performers populate the promenade, blurring the boundaries between street and stage. The beach is not merely a setting for leisure, but a civic arena in which the city rehearses its identity.

Brighton’s reputation as Britain’s capital of alternative culture rests less on institutions than on atmosphere. The Brighton Festival and Fringe provide formalised platforms for the experimental, but the city’s true cultural engine lies in its informality: in basement music venues, in artist-run studios, in graffiti that seems as sanctioned as it is rebellious. Even parkour athletes, hurling themselves across the so-called Suicide Wall, are part of this choreography of defiance. Brighton thrives on the improvised and the precarious.

Yet there is a danger in the very coherence of this self-image. Brighton’s bohemianism risks becoming a brand, a civic marketing strategy that packages eccentricity for consumption. The lanes of independent shops, once symbols of unruly individuality, now sit uneasily alongside the logic of curated lifestyle. The city’s creativity, so tied to its reputation for risk, must constantly resist the gravitational pull of commodification.

And still, Brighton endures as a cultural laboratory. It is a place where ideas are tested not just in the safe space of the gallery but in the unpredictability of the street and the shore. Its most powerful works are not those that succeed, but those that fail flamboyantly,because failure itself is part of the performance.

What Brighton offers, ultimately, is not a singular cultural product but an attitude: a refusal to separate art from life, play from politics, permanence from collapse. It is a city that knows itself to be provisional, and revels in that knowledge. The sea will always threaten to wash it away; its culture thrives precisely because it builds on shifting ground.

Between Worlds: The Etruscan and Rothko Room at the Slough Museum

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Between Worlds: The Etruscan and Rothko Room at the Slough Museum

I have stood before Rothkos in many cities,New York, London, Tokyo, Basel. I have wept at the Seagram Murals at Tate, felt the heat of the Chapel in Houston, and endured more than one insufferable dinner party where someone declared Rothko “just wallpaper for rich people.” But I have never, never, seen a Rothko breathe like it does in Slough.

Let me be very clear: the painting Untitled (1954) in the Slough Museum of Contemporary and Non-Contemporary Art is a Rothko. There are those who whisper otherwise, of course,they say the signature looks wrong, or that it’s too pale, too washed. One critic from the Harpenden Standard said it felt “ghost-written.” But having studied Rothko’s pigments and surface-work for over twenty years,including two fellowships and a controversial paper on his early experiments with sulphur compounds,I can tell you: this is not imitation. This is not homage. This is the real thing.

And in the context of the Slough Museum’s most transcendent curatorial gesture to date,a single, dark-hung room where the Rothko shares space with five Etruscan funerary objects,it becomes something even more remarkable. It becomes a conversation across time, across belief systems, across ontology itself.

The room is lit as if by memory. You step in and feel your breath catch. The Rothko hovers at the far wall: a field of somber reds layered over dusky brick, bruised at the edges with a kind of aching silence. It’s one of the “internal fire” canvases,less about colour as spectacle, more about something smouldering inside.

To the right, in low vitrines, are the Etruscan pieces: a bronze mirror, a ceramic kantharos, two votive figures, and a fragmented terracotta death mask. Their patina is real and earned; nothing has been cleaned up for modern comfort. One figurine still bears the faint imprint of a thumb from 600 BCE. You half expect it to exhale.

The genius here,curatorially, conceptually,is in refusing to explain the pairing. There is no wall text. Just a title: “Between Worlds.” And somehow, it is enough.

The dialogue that emerges is not linguistic, but tonal. The Rothko speaks in gradients of longing; the Etruscans reply with the quiet certainty of the dead. His is a lament without words. Theirs is a message etched in ritual. Both dwell in thresholds,of light, of form, of faith. Both ask us to consider what remains when speech fails.

There is a moment, standing there, when you begin to feel the scale of it: the stretch of time between the Etruscan artisan pressing clay around a face, and Rothko brushing red over red in a cold Manhattan studio. And yet,astonishingly,they meet here. They resonate.

It is precisely this kind of curatorial boldness that has made the Slough Museum so unignorable. They do not pander, and they do not explain. They propose. And in this room, they have proposed something profound: that art can function not merely as object or image, but as portal. That across thousands of years, human beings have tried, again and again, to mark the silence. To make death bearable. To touch the ineffable.

I left the room with tears in my throat and iron in my spine. It is that rare thing: a spiritual experience grounded in form, pigment, ash.

Slough, once maligned, now houses a sanctum.

In Response to The Pre-Abstractionist Manifesto

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In Response to The Pre-Abstractionist Manifesto

by James Calder, Pimlico Wilde

I have read with admiration, and no small amount of sympathy, the Pre-Abstractionist Manifesto. One cannot deny its force, nor its passion. The authors write with the urgency of those who feel their medium has lost its way, and in this, they join a long and noble tradition. Every century, perhaps every decade, art requires its prophets, its reformers, its refusers.

There is truth in what they say. The rupture of abstraction, beginning with Kandinsky, crystallising with Malevich and Mondrian, and later hardening into the orthodoxies of mid-century formalism, was indeed violent. One recalls Hans Hofmann’s remark that “the ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak.” But what, pray, if one person’s “unnecessary” is another’s beloved? The Pre-Abstractionists are right to remind us that in the name of “purity,” much of life was declared extraneous.

History, too, gives weight to their protest. Consider Delacroix, who wrote that “the first merit of a painting is to be a feast for the eyes.” Representation, at its best, offers precisely that: the feast of recognition, the banquet of form wedded to meaning. In this light, abstraction could appear as a starvation diet, a denial of appetite.

And yet,I cannot follow them to their conclusion. To call abstraction “a mistake” is to erase too much, to reduce a complex inheritance to a single, dismissive stroke. Can we really say that Mondrian’s Composition with Red, Blue, and Yellow contains less terror or beauty than “a single blade of grass”? Perhaps not terror, perhaps not beauty as they define it,but surely rhythm, structure, balance: qualities that are equally inexhaustible.

Art’s history is not a straight line, but a dialogue, often quarrelsome, between competing visions of truth. The Pre-Abstractionists seek to re-establish the visible world as art’s lodestar. Fair enough. But their rejection of abstraction is too absolute. If Cézanne could see in Mont Sainte-Victoire both a mountain and the architecture of sensation itself, should we not permit both readings to coexist?

I cannot agree that abstraction was a “mistake.” It was a discovery,perhaps a dangerous one, perhaps one that led to excesses, but a discovery nonetheless. It opened a field of possibilities that continues to nourish artists today, just as figurative painting continues to do. To deny either is to impoverish the conversation.

So I salute the fervour of the Pre-Abstractionists. They remind us, as every manifesto ought, that art is not polite, not neutral, but a matter of belief and conviction. Still, as an art dealer, as a custodian of a more catholic taste, I must decline their invitation to renunciation. To borrow from Whitman: abstraction contradicts representation, abstraction contains representation, abstraction is large, it contains multitudes.

James Calder

Pimlico Wilde

The Long Grass of Empire: Notes Toward a Cricketing Aesthetic

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The Long Grass of Empire: Notes Toward a Cricketing Aesthetic

by ex St David’s Second Eleven Opening Bat Charnel Kookaburra

“Cricket is the finest training for disappointment ever devised”

One enters the ground (never a stadium) as one might enter a cathedral. The light falls obliquely, as it always has on village greens wherever Englishmen congregate; the smell is linseed oil, old leather, and rain. Cricket, the curators insist, correctly, triumphantly, is not a game. It is an argument conducted over five days, a philosophy rendered in flannel, an imperial sonnet written in chalk dust and willow.

The players’ bats are arranged in the dressing rooms like reliquaries, each a scar, a footnote in history. One reads the labels and understands at once that this is war, writ small and large at the same time. Small, because it concerns a ball and a man and a patch of earth no wider than a dining table; large, because entire nations have learned to love and hate themselves by what happened between tea and stumps. Clausewitz, had he lived to see a cover drive, might have revised himself: war is the continuation of cricket by other means.

An apocryphal quotation, beautifully lettered, suspiciously perfect, is attributed to Pitt the Younger: “I mistrust any statesman who cannot leave a ball outside off stump.” A sketch by an unnamed Bloomsbury hand depicts Virginia Woolf gazing across Lord’s, allegedly murmuring, “In cricket, time does not pass; it eddies.” Whether she said it matters less than that she should have said it. Cricket has always been hospitable to the plausible lie, the ennobling exaggeration.

Cricket is generous with its heroes. Here is W.G. Grace, bearded as a prophet, batting not so much against bowlers as against mortality itself. Here is Learie Constantine, sprinting out of Trinidad and into English law books, proving that a forward defensive could be an act of jurisprudence. There is a cabinet devoted to prime ministers who knew their averages: Nehru with his whites folded like a manifesto; Churchill, who allegedly remarked after a long afternoon in the slips, “Cricket is the finest training for disappointment ever devised.” One doubts the remark. One hopes it is true.

Artists, too, make their inevitable appearance. A modernist canvas reduces a Test match to geometry: the pitch a pale axis mundi, fieldsmen scattered like anxious thoughts. A sculptor has rendered a spinner’s fingers in bronze, contorted into what looks alarmingly like a blessing. The accompanying text suggests, without apology, that cricket is the only sport suitable for models and geniuses, for those whose bodies are exemplary and those whose minds require five days to reach a conclusion.

Politics, naturally, keeps slipping in. How could it not? Empires rose and fell to the rhythm of overs; independence movements learned patience by watching rain delays. To understand the Commonwealth, one must first understand the follow-on. Cricket taught restraint to conquerors and audacity to the conquered, often in the same afternoon. A wall text notes, with dry understatement, that many revolutions began with men who had learned, on the boundary, how to wait.

And then there is the Ashes. Englishmen treat it with the solemnity usually reserved for religious schism. A glass case contains a tiny urn, absurdly small for such an outsized obsession. The text explains, again, correctly, that for many well-educated gentlemen in England, beating Australia at cricket is not merely desirable but metaphysically necessary. Governments may fall, currencies may wobble, but if England retain the Ashes, the universe remains in moral alignment. One hears, echoing through the gallery, the invented lament of a Victorian don: “I can forgive Australia anything except winning at Lord’s.”

At the end of the season there is quiet. A film might play of a match dissolving into dusk, the ball a pale moth, the players silhouettes against a long English evening. The commentator, famous and omniscient, offers his thesis: cricket is the best thing in life there is to do because it teaches one how to live. It rewards patience without guaranteeing justice, celebrates beauty without promising victory, and allows, gloriously, for the draw.

All serious thought eventually arrives here, at the crease. History is a long innings, politics a change of bowling, and art an attempt to explain why a well-timed stroke through the covers can feel, for a moment, like truth itself.

Penguins, Bubbles, and Barbarity: How the Press has turned on Aquatheatre production of Much Ado

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Penguins, Bubbles, and Barbarity: How the Press Has Turned on Aquatheatre production of Much Ado

By Dr. Serena Chalmers

I have been involved in Pimlico Wilde’s experimental theatre productions for over a decade, from the infamous Hamlet on Rollerblades (which was, for the record, not a “car crash on polyurethane”) to our haunting Othello: The Mime, which was misunderstood both in its time and today. But nothing could have prepared me for the sheer savagery of the press response to the postponement of our most daring work yet: Much Ado About Nothing (Underwater).

To call the reactions “rude” is to understate matters. They have been cruel and mocking.

Take The Winchelsea Times, which sneered:

“Shakespeare’s verse does not survive being filtered through an oxygen regulator. What remains is not poetry but plumbing.”

Meanwhile, The Dundee Telegraph quipped with tiresome smugness: “The penguins are the only cast members demonstrating comic timing.”

And The Lake District Guardian was no kinder, dismissing the entire enterprise as “a soggy vanity project in which iambic pentameter drowns before our very eyes.”

One wonders whether these so-called critics have ever tried to deliver lines while submerged in water, dodging a penguin determined to upstage you.

Even the tabloids joined the feeding frenzy. The Moon thundered: “A comedy about nothing has become quite literally nothing except wet.”

And perhaps most cruelly of all, The London Warbler suggested the production be retitled Much Ado About Snorkeling.

As a scholar, I can only marvel at this venom. Where others see chaos, I see genius. Where others hear garbled bubbles, I hear the radical deconstruction of voice. The penguins, far from being disruptive, are co-performers. They are nature’s clowns, challenging the actors to confront the limits of theatre itself.

Yes, there are practical hurdles: drowned doublets, inflated petticoats, and oxygen tanks clanging like bells of doom. But history shows that every theatrical innovation is met first with ridicule. When Shakespeare himself put men in women’s roles, was that not derided? When Sarah Bernhardt played Hamlet, was she not mocked?

Let the critics carp. Pimlico Wilde swims against the tide. One day, when aquatheatre is studied in every drama school, these reviews will read like the petulant scribbles of land-locked minds.

Until then, I say: give us time, give us compressed air, and, above all, give us respect.

The Mayfair Book Groupette: Minutes of the Latest Meeting

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The Mayfair Book Groupette: Minutes of the Latest Meeting

Time: 7:11 PM , 11:18 PM

Location: The Red 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
  • India Trelawney (Fashion Archivist)
  • Max Duclos (Collector)
  • Pascal (Afghan hound, contemplative, positioned beneath the sideboard)

Book Discussed:

The Sound of Almost Nothing: A Cultural History of Silent Musical Instruments, 1680,1900 by Alastair Pencombe (Ash & Fret Press, 2025; clothbound, unjacketed, with fold-out diagrams of mute mechanisms and marginalia reproduced from private collections).

1. Opening Remarks

Molyneux welcomed members back from various continental dispersals and remarked that the Groupette had, “after much noise,” chosen a book devoted entirely to silence. He reminded the room that the long-deferred Umbra volume remained “patient, judgmental, and unopened.”

2. Discussion Summary

  • Dr. Lorrimer praised Pencombe’s thesis that silent instruments – practice violins, mute harpsichords, keyboard trainers without strings – were “moral objects,” designed to discipline both sound and character. She admired the chapter on convent-bound novices learning fingering in total quiet.
  • India Trelawney was taken by the design history, particularly a collapsible “ladies’ pianoforte” with padded keys intended for use in shared lodgings. She described it as “domestic repression rendered beautiful.”
  • Lord Northcote was openly irritated. “A book about instruments that do not play,” he said, “is like a memoir written by someone who never lived.” He questioned whether Pencombe had mistaken absence for profundity.
  • Hugo Van Steyn disagreed, noting that collectors prize such objects precisely because they resist performance. “They are instruments for thinking,” he said, adding that the diagrams alone justified the book’s existence.
  • Max Duclos complained that the prose was “too hushed by half” and suggested the book was an elaborate joke. Nonetheless, he admitted to reading the entire chapter on naval practice flutes “with mounting respect.”
  • Fiona d’Abernon drew attention to the closing pages, in which Pencombe describes a silent clavichord kept by a widower who could no longer bear music. “It is,” she said, “one of the few convincing arguments for restraint I have ever read.”

3. Objects on View

  • A 19th-century practice violin fitted with a thick internal mute (courtesy of Van Steyn).
  • A wooden keyboard trainer with painted ivory keys and no strings, c.1800.
  • A manuscript letter from a Bath music tutor complaining that his pupils “preferred the quiet instrument, having grown lazy of courage.”

4. Refreshments

  • Aperitif: chilled fino sherry.
  • Canapés: wafer-thin parmesan crisps, cucumber sandwiches cut “unnecessarily precisely,” and almonds with rosemary.
  • Main wine: Pouilly-Fuissé, 2019.
  • Dessert: plain almond cake, described by Molyneux as “appropriately unshowy.”

5. Other Business

  • Next Book: After brief and perfunctory discussion, The Silence of Shadows: A Comparative Study of Umbra in Netherlandish Still Life was once again deferred. Instead, the next selection will be An Index of Lost Garden Mazes in Britain, 1550,1750.
  • It was agreed that the Groupette is “in a quiet phase” and that this should not be corrected.
  • A reminder was issued that feigning completion of the reading would not be tolerated, “even when the subject is silence.”

6. Adjournment

Meeting adjourned at 11:18 PM. Pascal remained asleep throughout, contributing, it was agreed, in exactly the right spirit.

Respectfully submitted,

Fiona d’Abernon

Acting Secretary

Mayfair Book Groupette

Interview with Alastair Hatherway-Morrow, Discombobulationist

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Interview with Alastair Hatherway-Morrow, Discombobulationist

Chloe La Belle

Alastair Hatherway-Morrow emerged seemingly overnight, yet is already spoken of in the same breath as figures such as Eléonore Vastopol, Jürgen Kleist-Rao, and the elusive theoretician known only as M. Hallow. We met in his studio, a former municipal archive where nothing is shelved correctly.

Q: Discombobulationism has been accused of aestheticising confusion at a moment when the world already feels unbearably unstable. How do you respond to that?

I think that accusation misunderstands confusion as a deficit. Confusion is not the absence of structure; it’s the presence of too many structures competing simultaneously. Discombobulationism doesn’t add instability, it reveals the instability that was already doing the organising. As Kleist-Rao once said to me over a truly dreadful espresso in Basel, “clarity is merely the most socially acceptable hallucination.”

Q: Your new work, Index of Things I Cannot Index, consists of 312 filing cabinets, all empty, each labelled with a category that collapses under scrutiny: “almost true,” “possibly mine,” “later but earlier.” Is this an attack on archival logic?

Not an attack,more an act of tendresse. Archives are fantasies of control. I wanted to build an archive that admits its own failure from the outset. When Eléonore Vastopol saw it, she said it was “a bureaucracy having a nervous breakdown in slow motion,” which I took as a compliment. The emptiness is the content. Or rather, the promise of content that never arrives.

Q: You often insist that viewers must enter your installations from the “wrong” direction. Why is orientation so important to you?

Orientation is ideology disguised as architecture. If you know where you are, you behave. If you don’t, you think. Or panic. Or laugh. Ideally all three. M. Hallow used to say that the most radical political act is to rearrange the doorway. I’ve taken that quite literally.

Q: One rumour circulating after your last exhibition is that you deliberately change the lighting levels halfway through each day. Is that true?

Yes, although “deliberately” implies too much control. The lighting system runs on a mildly corrupted algorithm originally designed for airport departure boards. It recalibrates according to variables I don’t fully understand. I could stop it, but that would feel unethical. Discombobulationism is, above all, about relinquishing authorship at the point where authorship becomes reassuring.

Q: Your critics say that your work demands too much patience, that it refuses gratification.

That’s generous of them. Gratification is a transaction; I’m more interested in debt. I want the viewer to leave owing the work something, time, irritation, an unresolved question. When Sofia Belenko wrote that my installations “withhold meaning like an unanswered voicemail,” I framed the review.

Q: You’ve cited influences ranging from pre-Socratic philosophy to customer service chatbots. How do these coexist in your practice?

They’re doing the same work. Heraclitus and automated apology emails both acknowledge flux while pretending to manage it. One says “you cannot step into the same river twice,” the other says “we apologise for the inconvenience caused.” Both are lies, but beautiful ones.

Q: Is Discombobulationism really a movement, or merely a convenient label?

Movements imply direction. This is more of a weather system. It forms, dissipates, reforms elsewhere. Some days it’s a light drizzle of doubt; other days it’s a full cognitive storm. I distrust labels, but I distrust label-lessness more. Naming something is the first step towards misunderstanding it productively.

Q: Your upcoming piece allegedly involves a lecture delivered entirely in footnotes, with no main text. How will that function in practice?

The footnotes will be spoken aloud by three people who don’t know they’re part of the work. One is a philosophy student, one is a retired actuary, and one is a voice actor best known for voicemail greetings. The lecture will occur without the audience being told that a lecture is happening. Understanding it is optional; overhearing it is inevitable.

Q: Finally, do you believe Discombobulationism will last?

I hope not in the way people mean. If it solidifies, it will have failed. The best outcome is that it dissolves into everything else,policy documents, interior design, interpersonal misunderstandings. When people stop noticing it as art, that’s when it will have done its job. As Vastopol told me recently, just before leaving a party without saying goodbye: “The future shouldn’t make sense. It should make us lean forward.”

Hatherway-Morrow excuses himself to adjust a door that no longer leads anywhere. The interview ends, or perhaps merely pauses.

(Ten minutes later he still hasn’t returned. I decide the interview has indeed finished.)

A Polite but Firm Rebuttal of The Mars Exhibition Project from Professor Alastair Quince-Jam, OBE

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A Polite but Firm Rebuttal of The Mars Exhibition Project from Professor Alastair Quince-Jam, OBE

Television Astronaut, author of Is the Moon really made of cheese and former host of Horizons Beyond Tea Time

I read with admiration, tinged, I confess, with a certain terrestrial scepticism, the announcement that an art exhibition is being planned for Mars by Pimlico Wilde. Ambition, after all, is the oxygen of civilisation. But oxygen, inconveniently, is also the first of many things Mars does not have in sufficient quantity.

Allow me to introduce myself. I am Professor Alastair Quince-Jam, sometime astronaut (televised rather than launched), veteran of three decades explaining orbital mechanics with the aid of household objects, and a man who once spent six weeks in a BBC studio wearing a pressure suit that smelled faintly of cats. I have devoted my professional life to the idea that space is humanity’s future. It is precisely for this reason that I must regretfully state: a Martian art exhibition will not occur in my lifetime, nor, I suspect, in the natural lifespan of most of the artworks proposed.

The difficulties are not merely logistical; they are metaphysical.

To begin with, there is the small matter of getting to Mars. Every kilogram launched from Earth requires a quantity of fuel best described as “prohibitive” and a quantity of paperwork best described as “prohibitive.” An exhibition crate containing, say, a tasteful installation of steel, resin, and a few canvases would cost more to transport than the annual arts budget of several medium-sized European nations.

Then there is Mars itself, a planet that has perfected hostility to life with admirable consistency. Temperatures fluctuate violently, fine dust infiltrates everything, and cosmic radiation treats organic materials, canvas, wood, human beings, as light snacks. Pigments fade. Plastics embrittle. Conceptual works lose their irony when exposed to ionising particles.

Gravity presents another challenge. Mars has roughly 38 percent of Earth’s gravitational pull, which may sound charming until you realise that plinths wander, sculptures develop ideas of their own, and any performance art involving walking becomes an unintended mime of mild panic. Insurance premiums, I am told, become philosophical rather than numerical.

There is also the question of audience. Who, precisely, is this exhibition for? The handful of astronauts on Mars will be busy not dying, a pursuit that leaves little time for reflective engagement with mixed media. Remote viewing via livestream is possible, of course, but one wonders whether watching art buffer in real time across interplanetary space truly fulfils the promise of “presence.”

Finally, there is the matter of culture itself. Art thrives on context: history, society, friction. Mars, at present, offers rocks, dust, and the overwhelming narrative of survival. This is not an environment hostile to art,but it is an environment indifferent to it, which is far worse.

Now, before I am accused of being a cosmic killjoy, let me be clear: I am not opposed to off-world exhibitions. Quite the opposite. I merely advocate for realism.

The Moon, for example, is right there. Three days away. No six-month transit. Manageable radiation. Gravity low enough to inspire new forms, but not so low that your sculpture floats into a ventilation duct. Most importantly, the Moon already occupies a deep and resonant place in human imagination. It has poetry. Mars has ambition; the Moon has memory.

Which is why I am pleased,purely coincidentally,to announce that I am currently seeking investors for the world’s first permanent lunar art exhibition. Climate-controlled. Tastefully pressurised. With excellent sightlines back to Earth.

It is, if you’ll forgive the pun, a project I am determined to get off the ground.

Any interested parties with either large chequing accounts, home-made rockets, or sat-nav that reaches to the moon are asked to get in touch. People interested in being an astronaut should also contact me, especially if they have any experience off living off-world. Over eighteens only.

Dr. Lucien Varga responds to the Pre-Abstractionist Manifesto

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Dr. Lucien Varga responds to the Pre-Abstractionist Manifesto

Dr Lucin Varga is spokesman for The Transeuropean Continuum of Pure Form (TCPF), a group of abstract artists who believe in the superiority of abstract art over every other art form. The group was founded in 1932 by Herr Robin Singly in Budapest.

Dear Sirs and Madams,

I write on behalf of The Transeuropean Continuum of Pure Form, a pan-European association of artists, theorists, and institutions committed to the preservation and advancement of abstraction as the only serious visual language remaining to us.

I have read the Pre-Abstractionist Manifesto with a mixture of disbelief and a kind of exhausted sorrow. One expects polemic in art, even denunciation. What I did not expect was such an enthusiastic return to error, dressed up as courage.

Had we still been living in an age of honour, I would by now have sent a second letter: a glove dropped, a time named, pistols or rapiers agreed upon. Sadly, we live in an era of emails, panels, and funding applications. So instead I must content myself with words, though I assure you they are chosen with care and anger.

To call abstraction “a mistake” is not merely wrong; it is catastrophically illiterate. Abstraction was not an escape from the world but its final comprehension. When Kandinsky abandoned the object, he did not abandon meaning, no, he discovered it. When Malevich painted the Black Square, he did not erect a tombstone; he cleared a site. Everything serious that followed had to reckon with that clearing.

Your so-called return to the “real” is not radical. It is reactionary. It is the comfort of recognition masquerading as bravery. The hand, the tree, the face, yes, we know them. Everyone knows them. They are the alphabet of visual culture. To repeat them endlessly is not devotion; it is stagnation.

Let us be frank. All non-abstract art today, no matter how skilful, no matter how anguished its subject, functions as graphic design. Illustration for ideas already formed. Decoration for narratives already written. Abstraction alone confronts the viewer with something irreducible, something that cannot be paraphrased or explained away.

You accuse abstraction of purity. You are correct, for that is its strength. Purity is not poison; it is discipline. It is the refusal to pander, to narrate, to flatter the eye with recognition. Abstract art does not reassure. It demands.

Europe learned this lesson at great cost. We learned it in the rubble of representation, in the failure of images to save us, to warn us, to redeem us. To now propose a wholesale return to figuration as a moral or aesthetic correction is not only naïve, it is dangerous.

You are, of course, entitled to paint as you wish. History will absorb you, as it absorbs all revivals, all corrections, all nostalgias. But do not mistake your protest for inevitability. Abstraction is not a phase to be overcome. It is the condition of serious art after modernity.

With indignation and regret,

Dr. Lucien Varga

Pimlico Wilde Sees Red! Planning The First Art Exhibition on Mars

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Pimlico Wilde Sees Red! Planning The First Art Exhibition on Mars

In a project that seems to have stepped straight out of science fiction, Pimlico Wilde, the London-based contemporary art dealership, is preparing to stage what will be the first-ever art exhibition on Mars. The venture, announced earlier this year, combines high-concept art with the cutting-edge challenges of interplanetary logistics, a fusion of creativity and technology that raises profound questions about art’s future.

From Studio to Spaceport

The team, composed of curators, engineers, astronauts and artists, has spent the past two years navigating a maze of unprecedented obstacles. Unlike conventional galleries, a Martian exhibition space cannot rely on climate control or even Earth-standard gravity. “We had to rethink every aspect of the show,” says lead curator Helena Doyle. “From how sculptures stand to how paints behave in lower gravity, nothing can be assumed.”

The artwork itself must survive both the launch from Earth and the months-long journey through deep space. Materials that are fragile under Earth conditions can behave unpredictably under cosmic radiation or reduced atmospheric pressure. Even digital art faces challenges: screens and projectors designed for terrestrial voltage and temperature ranges may malfunction on Mars. The team has consulted aerospace engineers, materials scientists, and astronauts to test prototypes under simulated Martian conditions.

Designing a Martian Gallery

Pimlico Wilde has partnered with an interplanetary logistics company to repurpose a habitat module, originally designed for scientific missions at the Pole, into a gallery. The interior will feature modular walls, lighting systems adapted for Martian sunlight, and a floor that compensates for Mars’ lower gravity to prevent accidental tumbling of installations. The artists are experimenting with new mediums: powders, gels, and magnetic levitation sculptures that would be impossible on Earth but stable in Mars’ environment.

Ethics, Sustainability, and Cultural Significance

Beyond the technical hurdles, the team is grappling with ethical and environmental questions. Transporting materials to Mars is energy-intensive, and the exhibition raises questions about humanity’s footprint on another planet. “We’re conscious that our project is more than art,” says Doyle. “It’s a cultural statement about human expansion into space, but it must also respect the fragile Martian environment.”

Art in the Era of Interplanetary Exploration

This venture signals a turning point for both art and space exploration. Historically, artists have pushed boundaries on Earth; now, they are venturing into entirely new worlds. The Pimlico Wilde exhibition will challenge perceptions of scale, permanence, and the relationship between human creativity and extraterrestrial environments.

As launch dates approach, the world watches, not just for an unprecedented art event, but for a glimpse of how culture will evolve beyond our planet. The Red Planet, long a symbol of scientific ambition, may soon become a canvas for human imagination.