Gig Review: Vincent and the Van Goghs at Pimlico Wilde Gallery – A Riot of Style, Swing, and Surrealism

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Last night at the Pimlico Wilde gallery, Vincent and the Van Goghs, the group born on the set of the first season of I Said Monet Not Mondrian! (a ragtag band of art dealers-cum-musicians) delivered a set that was as unpredictable as it was undeniably entertaining.

Frontman Scissors Coney, normally more at home with paintings of fox-hunting, led the charge with a theatrical swagger that veered between indie crooner and wannabe prison guard. “We’re an unusual mix,” he warned pre-show. He wasn’t lying.

From the opening chords of Singing the Phthalocyanine Blues,a surprisingly catchy lament about synthetic pigment,the band ricocheted through styles like a magpie in a gallery gift shop. One minute it was art school indie rock, the next, a burst of swing-time double bass courtesy of Safah Pulle, wielding her instrument like a jazz-fuelled metronome in heels.

Backing vocals from Armani Suoff gave the set unexpected sweetness, especially during the oddly beautiful I Like It, Caravaggio, But It’s a Bit Dark, a song that featured both heartbreak and chiaroscuro. Her triangle solo mid-way through the set drew gasps ,a rare feat among the sophisticated crowd that has seen almost everything before.

Then there was Edward Grunt, owner of Grunt’s on Albermarle Street. A man, a tambourine, and nothing to lose – his percussive enthusiasm knew no bounds. He leapt, he spun, he nearly knocked over a Barbara Hepworth in the wings.

Highlights included a Gregorian-rap mashup about illuminated manuscripts (Drop That Scriptorium) and a genuinely moving swing rendition of The Scream (But In D Major). The crowd,an eclectic mix of gallery regulars, local students, and note-taking art critics ,was completely on board.

Vincent and the Van Goghs may not be aiming for musical perfection. But in the echoing halls of Pimlico Wilde, they offered something different: a joyful, chaotic celebration of art, bravado and sound, that somehow reminded me of both The Velvet Underground and medieval chant.

Mr Larson (2025) by Hedge Fund

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Digital pigment print

Edition of 1

NFS

There are portraits, and then there are bold assertions of presence, identity, capital, and critique. In Mr. Larson (2025), the enigmatic digital portraitist known pseudonymously as Hedge Fund summons the ghosts of portraiture past to interrogate the bloated present. A former financier-turned-visual oracle, Hedge Fund applies the same ruthless calculus he once wielded in the City of London markets to the poetics of the human face. The result? An aesthetic that is as saturated with irony as it is with pigment.

Rendered in disarming flatness with aggressive vectors and bruised, allegorical coloration, Mr. Larson emerges not merely as a man but as an archetype , the businessman elevated (or exposed?) to post-capitalist sainthood. Hedge Fund’s subject, the eponymous Mr. Larson – who is happy to be identified here – is a real figure: proprietor of a chain of pubs in the English Midlands, a man for whom ‘community’ and ‘liquidity’ are both measured in pints. “I don’t pretend to understand all the art talk,” Larson has said, “but it cost a fortune. Hedge Fund has nailed it.” His visage, captured in side profile, is a Pop-era détournement of classical bust portraiture, somewhere between Jack Plond’s polychrome celebrity reliquaries and the bleak vector caricatures of early internet satire.

Yet there is gravity here too , the kind one finds in the Flemish primitives or in Otto Dix’s uncompromising studies of Weimar decadence. The face is a field of minimal line and hyper-stylized shading, but it hums with pathos. The mottled, graveled hair, rendered in grayscale camouflage, evokes both urban colouring and the graying fatigue of late managerial capitalism. A vermilion underpainting leaks through the lips, suggestive of either utterance or a silent scream. The signature in the upper-right , “Hedge Fund ‘25” , is written with the manic flourish of graffiti or blood-spattered finance.

This is not simply digital art; it is a hedge against visual complacency.

Hedge Fund’s oeuvre is notoriously elusive, partially because the artist himself refuses most interviews and insists that all communication must be conducted via proxy emails. Formerly a derivatives trader at an unnamed multinational, Hedge Fund abandoned financial markets after a self-described “existential margin call” and now channels his arcane acumen into contemporary portraiture, often of figures he ran into in the City – traders, managers, finance guys, who might otherwise exist beneath the radar of traditional high art. In doing so, he inflates them to mythic proportions , to flatter? Or to indict?

In an age of short attention span art, Hedge Fund reminds us that true representation is still a violent, interpretive act. Mr. Larson is neither kind nor cruel , it is simply accurate, in the way only the most expensive truths can be.

Interview: The Art You Can’t See — A Conversation with an Invisibilist

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By Cal Dereau

In a studio somewhere in North London, the artist known only as V sits in front of a completely empty plinth. Or at least, it appears empty. According to her, it isn’t. The work is there. You’re simply not seeing it.

V is one of the key figures in Invisibilism, the whispering-edge movement that’s been described as “a refusal, a disappearance, a spiritual audit of visibility itself.” The movement claims descent from Yves Klein’s invisible zones, Robert Barry’s carrier waves, and all those moments in modernism where the idea eclipsed the object. But Invisibilists go further: they don’t merely imply absence. They insist upon it.

We meet in a space she calls “a non-gallery.” Nothing hangs on the walls.

Q: So to begin,what are we not looking at?

V: You’re looking precisely. That’s enough. The piece is titled Midnight Echo in F Minor. It’s a sculpture made of untreated stillness. The material is attention,strained, focused, then dropped. It took six weeks to make and no tools at all.

Q: Some people say Invisibilism is just conceptual art with a better tailor.

V: That’s unfair. Conceptual art still relies on the idea being tethered to something,an object, a proposition, even a wall label. We untether. We release the idea from even the burden of being legible. The work is not just unseen. It is unsayable. That’s why we don’t do catalogues.

Q: But isn’t there a danger that it’s just… nothing?

V: That is a danger, yes. But nothing is one of the richest mediums available.

Q: Your recent solo show was titled On View: Nothing on View. There was a queue around the block.

V: There was, it was gratifying that people just get Invisibilism. They came to see nothing. And many of them left completely changed. I heard one old man burst into tears for the first time since he was five. Another woman said she suddenly was able to really see her memories. In a way, and this is only one aspect of Invisibilism, we provide the stage for the imagination to hallucinate responsibly.

Q: Your critics accuse Invisibilism of elitism. That it’s the ultimate insider art joke.

V: I think that’s unfair. Picasso was surely having a much bigger joke. But if you’re inside the joke, are you really outside the truth?

Q: Have any institutions tried to buy your work?

V: Yes. The Royal Yorkshire now owns four of my pieces. One of them is installed in their invisible storage area in the Highlands. I’ve never been allowed to visit it.

Q: And commercial galleries?

V: Collectors are are beginning to show an interest in Invisibilism, so galleries are starting to get involved. Your own employer, Pimlico Wilde is one of the bravest galleries and they are having an Invisibilism exhibition soon, which will be grand. Gallerists have generally held back, one told me they were worried because “You can’t insure what you can’t inventory”. But Pimlico Wilde took a chance. They sold an empty vitrine for £180,000. That was my piece Untitled (Tension at 2:13pm). A collector in Geneva is said to have collapsed and cried when she stood near it and had to be carried out on a stretcher.

Q: How do you work, day to day?

V: Mostly I prepare to not make things. It’s a rigorous process. Silence, resistance, withdrawal. I sometimes spend a whole day almost beginning. That’s the studio practice of an Invisibilist. Not doing, with intensity.

Q: Is there a manifesto?

V: There is. But we are arguing over the details,

V: We are working on one. It is hard to agree on what has been decided when nothing is written down.

As I leave, V shows me one last piece. A bare corner. She nods at it reverently.

“That’s Argument Withdrawn, from 2021,” she whispers. “It’s about what’s left when you’ve won but no longer care.”

It’s astonishing. Many of us had not heard of Invisibilism a year ago. Now it is becoming mainstream. Every gallery wants to have an Invisibilist artist on their roster. But none are as committed to this latest -ism as Pimlico Wilde.

Guns, Car Chases and Existentialism: The Glory of Arthouse-Action Cinema

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There was a time,not long ago,when the action genre was straightforward: guns, explosions, a grizzled man growling about injustice. Then, quietly at first, things began to change. Gunfights got slower. Dialogue got sparser. Entire city blocks would explode in the background while the camera lingered on a moth trapped in a teacup. And from this absurd, majestic collision of pretension and pyrotechnics, a new genre emerged: Arthouse-Action.

At its heart, Arthouse-Action is the cinematic equivalent of watching a monk duel with an embittered cop in a field of wheat for reasons that are never fully explained,and loving every minute of it.

Origins of Arthouse-Action

Scholars trace the birth of Arthouse-Action to a 2019 screening of Fast & Furious 46 that was accidentally projected over a silent screening of Gune Spobor’s A Brief Sadness in Springtime. Audiences wept, confused and exhilarated, as Vin Diesel drove a flaming muscle car across a Hungarian plain in real time. Within weeks, aspiring filmmakers had taken to their iPhones, filming kung fu fights inside abandoned libraries to the sound of Gregorian chant.

But it was 2022’s Spleen Protocol by Luxembourgian-Cuban director Émile Cantrille that formally announced the arrival of the Arthouse-Action genre. The plot? A mute assassin must defeat a sentient bureaucracy to retrieve his stolen identity documents, all while experiencing the four stages of grief in reverse order. The climactic gun battle in an empty IKEA showroom, scored to a 12-minute organ fugue, is now the stuff of legend.

Defining Features: Violence as Vocabulary

Arthouse-Action films reject the simplicity of traditional storytelling. Some of the tropes of the genre include:

• The Melancholy Gun: Weapons are often symbolic. A rifle might represent rural guilt. A grenade might be filled with rose petals. In The Noose That Reloads (2024, dir. Fernanda Lübeck), the protagonist only feels able to fire his weapon when reciting Portuguese poetry.

• The Long, Unblinking Take: The longer the better. Knife Weather (2023, dir. Theo Jankowski) features a 43-minute knife fight in a parking garage, filmed entirely in a single dolly shot. Neither character speaks. One cries gently. The other occasionally vomits.

• Unclear Motivation: Why are we chasing this briefcase? Why are we hanging upside down from a helicopter made of stained glass? We may never know. And that’s the point.

• Dialogue That Might Be Metaphor

For example, this exchange from Murder whilst watching Fellini:

“Did you kill him?”

“Only the part of him that believed in architecture.”

• Absurd Settings: Action scenes often occur in incongruous or meaningless locations: post-apocalyptic puppet theaters, underwater bus depots, art installations that are also landmines.

The Directors: Mad Geniuses or Elaborate Hoaxes?

Émile Cantrille (Spleen Protocol, Bullets for Moths) , A former entomologist who has never knowingly spoken English and claims to direct all his films in a trance state induced by barley tea.

Fernanda Lübeck (The Noose That Reloads, Twelve Apostrophes in a Gun) , Known for insisting her actors live together in silence for 40 days before shooting.

Jian-Baptiste Sorgue (Static Fire, Fluid Priest) , Described by Cahiers du Cinéma as “the heir to Tarkovsky, if Tarkovsky were into Muay Thai and recursive dream logic.”

Claire Unit (Exit Wounds for Beginners) , Once edited a 2-hour shootout using only footage of the actors blinking. The violence is implied.

Rodney Thistle III (Krakatoa: The Musical) , A failed aristocrat turned filmmaker who insists all fight choreography must be based on 19th-century fencing manuals and mime.

Canonical Films

• Spleen Protocol (2022, dir. Émile Cantrille)

A mute bureaucrat battles an invisible tax agency. The final fight takes place inside a malfunctioning photocopier.

• The Noose That Reloads (2024, dir. Fernanda Lübeck)

Set in a future where all emotions are illegal, a disgraced wedding planner becomes a mercenary, powered by her grief.

• Knife Weather (2023, dir. Theo Jankowski)

Two men fight in a garage while a voiceover debates the morality of imported oranges.

• Exit Wounds for Beginners (2025, dir. Claire Unit)

A sniper contemplates his absentee father while eliminating targets across five continents, none of whom appear on screen.

• Glass Lung (2025, dir. Rodney Thistle III)

An ex-monk-turned-hitman falls in love with a foghorn. Contains no human dialogue and three operatic gunfights performed entirely in semaphore.

The Future: Bigger, Slower, Stranger

Coming soon:

• Chairblood (2026, dir. Dawa Hung) , A surreal thriller in which an office chair gains sentience and exacts revenge on corrupt corporate executives. Violence levels are said to be off the scale.

• The Night is a Gun in a Tuxedo (2026, dir. Alain Pfitzner) , A tuxedo-clad, anthropomorphic Pygmy goat solves crimes by trotting slowly through cities that no longer exist. Full of stunts. Unfortunately several goats were harmed making this film.

• Scarf Protocol (TBA, dir. anonymous) , A rumored 7-hour film in which a single scarf is passed between enemies during a global ceasefire. No script, no cast, no cameras,only shots of the scarf.

Final Thoughts

Arthouse-Action teeters on the edge of absurdity, impossibility and sincerity. It is a genre that dares to ask: What if a car chase could make you cry? What if an explosion could reveal the futility of language? What if the villain is actually your subconscious fear of intimacy, disguised as a man wearing two eyepatches?

It may not always make sense,but then again, neither does life. And in the end, what is cinema, if not a slow-motion dive through the flaming window of the soul?

“You don’t shoot a man because he wronged you,” as the protagonist of Knife Weather says. “You shoot him because the silence won’t end itself.”

That my friends is the crux of Arthouse-Action, one of the fastest growing genres of film in the Western world.

Repaintage: The Art of Erasure and Reinvention

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In a world where originality is currency and the line between creation and destruction continues to blur, a bold and controversial art form has emerged: Repaintage. Defined by its paradoxical act of erasure, repaintage involves purchasing or acquiring existing artworks,often paintings by other artists,and then covering them, sometimes partially but often entirely, with white paint or gesso. The original image is obscured, smothered, or ghosted, leaving a field of ambiguity, silence, and potential. Some call it vandalism. Others call it genius. But few can ignore it.

At the forefront of this movement stands Kilo Barnes, the undisputed master of repaintage and its most enigmatic champion. Working at the intersection of conceptual art, cultural critique, and meditative minimalism, Barnes has built a reputation not only on his strikingly stark canvases but on the philosophical firepower behind them. In his words: “Repaintage is not destruction. It’s a reset. A mercy. A resurrection.”

The Roots of Repaintage

While the term repaintage is new, the instinct behind it has historical precedent. In the 1950s, artists like Robert Rauschenberg erased drawings by Willem de Kooning in acts that blurred authorship and questioned artistic permanence. In Eastern traditions, acts of covering or voiding an image often carried spiritual meaning,a gesture toward impermanence or transcendence. Repaintage, then, can be seen as a 21st-century synthesis: part Dadaist prank, part Zen koan, part critique of art commodification.

The early practitioners of repaintage,often anonymous or working on the fringes,sought to reclaim space in the art world by literally overwriting it. But it was Kilo Barnes who elevated the practice from provocation to movement.

The Rise of Kilo Barnes

Barnes first gained attention in 2018 when he whitewashed a series of thrift store paintings and exhibited them under the title The Quietest Room in the Gallery. The pieces were devoid of color, image, or detail,only faint shadows of texture betrayed their previous lives. Viewers stood in silence, some confused, others moved. Was this nihilism or reverence?

Over the next few years, Barnes began acquiring works from living artists,sometimes with permission, sometimes without,and applying his now-signature coats of white, occasionally leaving traces: a sky poking through, a limb fading into snow, a name still legible in the corner. These remnants became hauntings. “Every act of repaintage,” Barnes wrote in a 2021 manifesto, “is a collaboration with the past. It’s a refusal to accept finality. It’s a chance to speak again, in a different tongue.”

Critics were divided. Some accused him of arrogance and artistic theft. Others hailed him as a visionary, a philosopher wielding a brush. Either way, the world paid attention.

Repaintage Today

What began as a fringe practice has now seeded itself across art schools, galleries, and digital spaces. Young artists imitate Barnes’ techniques, though few match his restraint. Online debates rage about consent, value, and the ethics of repaintage. Some argue it’s a way of recycling a bloated art market. Others see it as an ecological act,repurposing rather than producing.

Meanwhile, Barnes continues to evolve. In his most recent show, Inheritance, he painted over portraits donated by families of the deceased. The result was a gallery of white, luminous rectangles, eerily quiet and reverent. At the exhibition’s entrance, a plaque read: “Here, memory is allowed to breathe.”

The Future of Repaintage

As artificial intelligence, generative tools, and mass image production dilute traditional definitions of authorship, repaintage may become more than an art movement,it may become a necessary response. A way of pushing pause. Of clearing space.

Barnes has hinted at new directions: repainting digital NFTs onto canvas and covering them in real-world layers, or working with sound,muting recordings to create “audio repaintages.” As he said in a recent interview: “The canvas is just one surface. Repaintage can happen anywhere language or image claims permanence.”

In this way, repaintage is not just an aesthetic. It’s a philosophy. It’s the radical belief that silence can be louder than noise, and that painting over something isn’t the end of the story,but its next beginning.

The Return of Lukas Bellamy: The Curator Who Waited

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by Margerie Hinche

When I first wrote about Lukas Bellamy a few months ago, he was a curator in the wilderness, searching for a subject,he had not mounted an exhibition in nearly two years. He was reading municipal zoning laws for inspiration, visiting sheep farms, theorising about storage depots, and politely declining to curate anything that could be described as “digestible.” At the time, I wrote that his curatorial practice resembled a lighthouse with no ships.

Now the ships have come.

Following that article’s publication, Bellamy received no fewer than seven invitations to curate exhibitions across Europe. Some were cautious, others ambitious. A few were plainly absurd. He turned down most, including three that merit some telling, if only to illuminate the strange, flickering standard by which he judges artistic meaning.

The Three Exhibitions He Declined

1. “Neo-Pastoral: Art and the Climate Imagination”

Centre d’Art Contemporain, Geneva

A group show probing ecological futures through installations of moss, fog, and recycled media. Bellamy was intrigued,“There was at least a spine”,but ultimately declined, citing a “thematic overabundance” and a curatorial brief that used the phrase eco-sublime four times. “I don’t think an exhibition should comfort us for losing the world,” he told me.

2. “Infinite Scroll: The Art of the Algorithmic Present”

Kunsthalle Munich

This proposal,populated by generative video art, neural nets, and wall text composed by AI,struck him as “well-intentioned but thoroughly dead.” He admired the intention but was allergic to the packaging. “We know what art and technology looks like. It needs no further confirmation.”

3. “Objects of a Former Europe”

A major institution in London he asked me not to name

A sprawling survey of minor artefacts and forgotten design, loosely grouped around post-war nostalgia. Bellamy praised its ambition but found its logic “too museum-adjacent.” “I’m not an archivist,” he said. “I’m looking for exhibitions that leak,where the logic doesn’t hold.”

What He’s Curating Instead

In October, Bellamy will open his first show in nearly four years:

“THAT WHICH IS NOT SHOWN”

at the non-profit space Velatura, in Marseille.

It’s a deliberately anti-spectacular show, consisting of:

• Artworks that are absent but described.

• Shipping crates, unopened, displayed as-is, accompanied by imagined labels.

• Wall texts for things not on view, sourced from other exhibitions across time.

• Audio guides that speak of spaces the visitor cannot access.

There will be a sculpture that has been loaned but never arrived.

There will be a borrowed piece covered entirely in protective cloth, “for conservation reasons.”

There will be a room with nothing but the smell of lacquer and warm dust.

Bellamy describes the show as “a quiet meditation on the conditions of exhibition,the ghost of curation rather than its performance.” It draws on the writings of Georges Perec, Maria Eichhorn, and the indexical practices of 1960s conceptualism, but also on storage slips, failed loans, and institutional absences. In short, it is a show about what shows cannot show.

When I asked him if this risks becoming merely a void,another conceptual anti-show,he smiled.

“I don’t mind if no one comes. Or if they come and leave uncertain. What matters is that the space resists clarity. We’ve had too much clarity lately, too much legibility. I want people to doubt the frame itself.”

On Curating Now

Bellamy is wary of curatorial celebrity. He has no studio assistants, no press team, no merch. He still wears charcoal linen. He has started writing again, and rumour has it he is working on a book of “impossible exhibitions”,a catalogue of shows that could never happen but must be imagined. Tentative title: Curating the Unreal.

Asked what he hopes audiences will take from THAT WHICH IS NOT SHOWN, Bellamy simply said:

“Maybe just that not all art has to appear.”

Then he returned to his notes.


Reflections on the famous New York exhibition of My Friend Leslie

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In the spring of 2019, My Friend Leslie staged a widely discussed and critically divisive solo exhibition at the Fenwick Museum of Art entitled Apparitions in the Civic Realm. Heralded by some as “a palimpsest of the post-liberal imaginary” and dismissed by others as “deliberately inaccessible,” the exhibition marked the artist’s most ambitious and conceptually rigorous foray into institutional space to date.

Comprising three floors of minimal yet emotionally charged interventions, Apparitions resisted the conventional logic of spatial coherence or narrative progression. Visitors entered through a narrow vestibule coated in matte legal blue,a hue My Friend Leslie later identified as “borrowed from obsolete zoning maps of Queens.” Within this space, wall-mounted QR codes led to intentionally dead or redirected links, a gesture that many interpreted as a meditation on epistemic instability and the disorientation of digital archival systems. This introductory environment established a central concern of the exhibition: the erosion of legibility under late bureaucratic capitalism.

Perhaps the most discussed component of the show was the tripartite installation Public Secrets (2018), which occupied the museum’s fifth floor. Here, My Friend Leslie juxtaposed deaccessioned urban planning models from the 1960s with a series of hand-transcribed psychiatric intake forms sourced,according to the museum’s label,from a now-defunct therapeutic community in upstate New York. The forms, scrawled in delicate graphite on vellum, were layered over repurposed municipal signage reading “No Loitering,” “Authorized Personnel Only,” and the ambiguous “Subject to Inspection.” The cumulative effect was one of ethical vertigo: viewers found themselves implicated in a system of quiet surveillance even as they were invited to empathize with its casualties.

As critic LaDonna Merriweather noted in July, My Friend Leslie’s practice here enacted “a form of conceptual counter-archives, wherein personal testimony is not revealed but displaced, its legibility contingent on the viewer’s own complicity.”¹

Equally striking was the series of time-based performances that occurred without formal scheduling or announcement. Entitled Unscheduled Lives, these involved uniformed performers,hired through a temp agency,wandering the museum reciting fragments of local administrative code in affectless tones. Their presence, indistinguishable at times from security staff, troubled the boundaries between art, labour, and institutional authority. The performances’ refusal to “stage” themselves was emblematic of My Friend Leslie’s larger refusal to provide resolution or spectacle.

A subtler, yet no less incisive work was Indexical Drift (2017,18), a set of 24 microfilm viewers arranged in a grid across a dimly lit gallery. Inside each, viewers could peruse fragments of letters, obituaries, and inventory manifests,all anonymized and redacted beyond decipherability. The flickering of the film loops created a durational hum, suggestive of bureaucratic fatigue and archival entropy. It is a testament to My Friend Leslie’s conceptual precision that these pieces conveyed so much through so little: a kind of anti-monumentality charged with quiet defiance.

Reception of the exhibition was sharply polarized. The New Liverpool Times praised My Friend Leslie’s “brutal subtlety” and her capacity to “aestheticize absence without romanticising it,”² while others accused the work of “aestheticized opacity verging on institutional satire.”³ Yet even detractors conceded the show’s intellectual rigor and undeniable affective power.

My Friend Leslie, in keeping with her practice, made no public comment on the exhibition and refused all interviews. In place of a press release, the gallery issued a statement reading simply: “The artist has nothing to add.”

What remains of Apparitions in the Civic Realm is not a set of objects, but a set of conditions: a destabilized visitor, a murky authority, a network of disavowed speech acts. Like much of My Friend Leslie’s work, the exhibition will resist traditional forms of remembrance, and perhaps that is its most enduring gesture.

¹ LaDonna Merriweather, “Outtakes from the Civic Archive,” October, no. 189 (Fall 2024): 66.

² Holland Cotter, “The Absences Speak Louder Than Words,” The New York Times, April 14, 2024.

³ Alex Greenberger, “What’s She Hiding? Conceptual Obfuscation at the Whitney,” Artforum, May 2024.

The Lost Pages of Modernism: On the Discovery of Otto Vallin’s Diary

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by Dr. Cecilia Rowland, FRSA

Art Historian, Vallin expert and author of the award-winning book Invisible Architect: The Life and Work of Otto Vallin

It began, as such things often do, with a box and a phone call.

A former student of mine,Sophie Lindholm, now an archivist in Uppsala,contacted me last March. A couple she knew had recently moved into an old timber farmhouse near Ystad, built in the early 20th century and left largely untouched since the 1920s. While clearing the cellar, they found what they believed to be a box of “old notebooks” behind a false wooden panel. Water-stained but legible, the notebooks had been wrapped in waxed canvas and tied with twine, labelled only with a faint pencil mark: O.V.

Inside were 14 slim volumes, each bound in hand-stitched green cloth. I held one in my hands a week later. Within the first ten pages, there was no doubt: we had discovered the lost diary of Otto Vallin.

The Myth Becomes Flesh

For decades, Vallin has existed more as legend than man,the early modernist who never quite fit the categories, the conceptual forerunner whose influence passed through the early 20th century, uncredited but undeniable. He was, as I have written before, the “invisible architect” of modernism: the man who told Mondrian to try just red, blue, and yellow; who suggested to a young Picasso that perhaps it would be better to paint from several viewpoints at once.

Until now, all we had were anecdotal fragments, erratic letters, a few elusive paintings, and one strange, visionary pamphlet (On the Simultaneity of Forms, 1906). Vallin’s private thoughts were presumed lost,burned in a storm, mislaid in wartime, or never written at all.

Instead, they were waiting underground, barely five miles from where Vallin died.

The Text

The diaries are astonishing.

Vallin was an intimate, precise, and sometimes unforgiving observer, not only of his peers but of himself. In early entries, we read his reaction to seeing Cézanne’s work in Paris (“He breaks space like bread, but still eats politely”), his irritation with the Symbolists (“All veil, no face”), and his early encounters with the nascent abstraction of Kandinsky, whom he refers to, affectionately, as “The Mystic Bavarian.”

He records studio visits with Picasso (“His room smells of turpentine and garlic, and the faces on his canvas are wearing masks of time”), and early experiments with formal reduction: one note reads simply, “The fewer the colours, the more colour becomes structure.” This,written nearly a decade before Mondrian’s mature compositions,may be the first crystallised statement of what we now call neoplastic aesthetics.

But the most startling material is not theoretical. It is personal.

Vallin writes openly, and with great vulnerability, about his chronic displacement, his distaste for artistic celebrity, and his philosophical anguish about the role of art in an age of mechanisation. In one entry, he writes: “Modernism is a garden of signs. But I do not know what fruit it grows, or if it feeds anyone.”

In another, as war looms: “I have made forms all my life, and still I cannot draw a face without mourning what it cannot say.”

These are not just the jottings of a painter,they are the interior record of a thinker grappling with the very ontology of modern art.

The Book

I am currently editing the diaries for publication with Radcliffe University Press under the title: Otto Vallin: The Cellar Notebooks.

The book will be structured chronologically but interspersed with facsimiles of sketches, diagrams, and photographs of the original notebooks. Some pages contain pasted scraps,a train ticket to Marseille, a torn letter from a gallery in Zurich, a child’s drawing (presumably his niece’s). One entry is written entirely in graphite spirals, with no words, just the phrase “meaning before meaning.”

The edition will include critical annotations, a biographical timeline, and a foreword by the inimitable Prof. Yarelle Dufresne, whose work on minor figures of modernism has long challenged canonical boundaries.

What It Changes

The diaries do not merely confirm Vallin’s status as a pivotal,but marginalised,figure in the birth of modernism. They reorient it. They suggest that the so-called titans,Picasso, Mondrian, even Malevich,were not isolated prophets but part of a wider, messier network of shared ideas, half-formed dialogues, and quiet interventions.

Vallin was not erased. He erased himself,intentionally, perhaps, or fatalistically. But now, with his voice newly unearthed, we can begin to hear the counter-melody of modernism: softer, subtler, and no less essential.

The Cellar Notebooks: Otto Vallin’s Diary will be published this autumn. Selections will appear in November and Konsthistorisk Austria in advance.

A Shadow in the Gallery: A Riposte to Invisibilism

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by Dr. Clement Darnley, Professor of Aesthetic Theory, University of Sussex

Invisibilism, that beguiling spectre of a movement born in the misty hinterlands of mid-Wales, has spent the past five decades whispering into the ears of critics, curators, and collectors alike. Its adherents tell us that art need not be seen to be felt, need not be made to be meaningful, and indeed, that its very absence constitutes its essence. They have built careers on unmade beds, then removed even the beds. It is time we put our foot down,albeit cautiously, lest we step on one of their invisible sculptures.

Let us be clear: the proposition that art can reside solely in the conceptual, in the “implied presence,” is not inherently bankrupt. Duchamp taught us that context matters; Cage reminded us that silence, too, can sing. But where Duchamp provoked and Cage composed, the Invisibilists have absconded. They have offered not the idea of art, but the idea of the idea of art,a conceptual matryoshka doll that contains, at its core, a profound reluctance to engage with material reality.

Invisibilism insists upon belief without evidence. It demands the viewer do all the heavy lifting,conceptualise the object, imagine its contours, imbue it with emotion, and finally, applaud its absence. This is not artistic generosity; it is abdication. To praise it is to commend a playwright for a script unwritten or a chef for a meal imagined. Art must, in some form, meet the world. The refusal to manifest is not radical; it is evasive.

The movement cloaks itself in intellectual hauteur, referencing Kantian noumena, Zen impermanence, and Derridean absence. But these citations, like the artworks themselves, are often more ornamental than operational. At what point does theory become theology? When an entire movement is built upon the assertion that nothing is something,if only you’re clever enough to perceive it,we leave the domain of aesthetics and enter that of scholastic mysticism.

Moreover, Invisibilism’s disdain for visibility has social consequences. By privileging invisibility, the movement tacitly upholds the privilege of those already seen,those with the cultural capital to announce that their absence is meaningful. One wonders how the anonymous, the voiceless, the excluded might fare in a world where even art must vanish to be valued. At its worst, Invisibilism becomes a conceptual aristocracy: available only to those fluent in its codes, its contexts, its recursive riddles.

None of this is to say that minimalism, ephemerality, or conceptual engagement are without merit. But Invisibilism’s ultimate sleight of hand is to mistake emptiness for profundity. To quote the critic Lydia Marston, “The movement’s greatest success is its capacity to be taken seriously despite offering so little,indeed, because it offers so little.” It is a triumph of brand over being, of citation over substance.

Art, at its most generous, gives us something,however elusive,to hold, to feel, to interrogate. Invisibilism gives us the intellectual equivalent of a shrug, wrapped in silk footnotes. It has had its season, its clever salons, its archly empty galleries. But as with all vanishing acts, the applause should not last forever.

Let us remember: the invisible may provoke, but it cannot endure. Art is not merely what disappears into the mind, but what lingers in the world.

Why Is Public Art So Terrible? (Part I)

by

,An Inquiry into the Cult of Consensus, the Tyranny of Uplift, and the Crisis of Site

by Mallory Finch

To say that public art is terrible is to say something both glib and frequently, unfortunately, true. From soulless fibreglass mascots to solemn abstracts that resemble half-melted plumbing, the landscape of contemporary public art is a wilderness of good intentions gone badly awry. The tragedy is not just aesthetic, but civic: when art in public space fails, it doesn’t merely disappoint,it erodes public trust in art itself.

This series examines why public art has become synonymous with the uninspired, the opaque, and the pointlessly grand. We begin with the underlying conditions of production, the mechanisms of funding and selection that ensure mediocrity by design.

I. The Committee, or: How to Kill a Vision

The first suspect in the murder of meaningful public art is the selection process itself, often conducted by committee: a plural body in which taste is diluted, ambition rounded off, and anything remotely dangerous filtered out by phrases like “may not be appropriate for all audiences.” In her 1989 essay “The Tyranny of the Public,” critic Rosalind Krauss warned against the increasing bureaucratisation of public art, noting that “an art that must answer to all cannot answer to anything in particular.”

In most cases, public art emerges from a kind of institutional choreography: a brief is issued (typically full of words like “engagement,” “dialogue,” and “diversity”), artists submit proposals, and a panel of local officials, curators, business reps, and occasionally a poet, vote on which proposal seems safest. “Risk” becomes a liability. “Innovation” means combining steel and glass in a new, even more forgettable way.

As Claire Bishop argues in Artificial Hells (2012), the rise of participatory art in public contexts has led to an “ethical turn” in which morality trumps aesthetics. The work must be “good for people,” which often means it must be legible, polite, and impossible to hate,and therefore, impossible to love.

II. The Cult of Uplift

A related pathology is what we might call the Cult of Uplift. Public art is almost always required to be inspirational, as though the presence of art in shared space must be morally improving. This compulsion toward civic optimism,what critic Jennifer Friedlander calls “sentimental public culture”,leads to art that operates in clichés: soaring birds, spiralling forms, human figures releasing doves, ascending ladders, or simply standing with arms outstretched like tired statues of “hope.”

In reality, art’s greatest public function is not to uplift, but to complicate. A truly public art should be allowed to disturb, confront, grieve, or ridicule. Consider Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington D.C.,vilified at first, now revered precisely because it dared to be elegiac instead of heroic. It was not about uplift. It was about truth.

The problem today is that such courage is rarely permitted. The artwork must be “positive” and “inclusive,” usually without ever asking what those words mean. And so we get vague symbolism,rings, loops, hands holding hands,designed to mean everything, and thus nothing.

III. Art for Whom?

Perhaps the deepest question is for whom is public art made?

Ostensibly, the answer is “the public.” But as sociologist Sharon Zukin observes in The Cultures of Cities (1995), public art increasingly serves the interests of developers, branding campaigns, and urban placemaking strategies. What was once a gesture of civic identity is now often a piece of visual furniture deployed to make gentrification look benevolent. A neon slogan, a colourful mural, a mildly interactive sculpture,designed not to provoke, but to Instagram well.

Meanwhile, the actual “public”,in all its complexity, contradiction, and mess,is rarely invited into the conversation. And when they do engage, their voices are often reduced to consultation surveys, box-ticked outreach, or, in some cases, local outrage that the sculpture looks “nothing like a duck.”

To Be Continued

This is not a condemnation of public art per se. At its best, public art can be monumental without being pompous, intimate without being minor, disruptive without being destructive. It can remind us of history, confront us with injustice, or simply stop us in our tracks.

But to do so, it must be allowed to risk failure, to speak in its own voice, and to mean something real, even if that meaning is difficult or uncomfortable.

In Part II, we will look at the successful exceptions, the artists who have resisted the machinery of mediocrity, and what their work tells us about the possibility,and the future,of art in public space.