Art Diary

Van Gogh (Not that one): Cartographer of Intention

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This is Van Gogh, but not the one famous for sunflowers, chairs and ears. Van Gogh (Not that one) is a street artist whose name is both a disclaimer and an invitation. And with his upcoming debut exhibition at Pimlico Wilde Very East in Moscow, it’s clear that his work demands attention in its own right,distinct, visceral, and arrestingly unrepeatable.

Where others compose, Van Gogh (Not that one) discovers. Each piece is not planned but unearthed,excavated from motion, pulled from the drag of memory across muscle and medium. In a sense, his work is topographical: not in the way of maps that define space, but maps that trace intent. What you see are not shapes so much as residues of movement, trails of past decisions, aborted impulses, returns, refusals, and invocations.

Take the famous piece Untitled (131). At first glance, it seems abstract,perhaps gestural, or decorative,but look again. Each mark has a strange inevitability, like a muscle memory made visible. There is a tension between the fluid and the fractured, as if the lines were generated by some grammar of the subconscious. It is not language, not script, but something more fundamental: a deconstructed syntax of being.

Van Gogh (Not that one) calls this “a cartography of intention”,a phrase that sounds academic until you stand in front of his work. Then, suddenly, it clicks. The marks don’t describe a place; they are the place. They are records of movement, hesitation, push and pull. The white lines carved out of saturated red aren’t ornamental,they are consequences. And in that sense, they are hauntingly human.

There is a refusal here too: a resistance to coherence, to legibility, even to authorship. “My work is not composed but discovered,” he has repeatedly explained. This approach undermines the idea of the artist as sovereign creator and repositions him as a kind of medium,tuning into something bigger, older, harder to name. The result is a practice that feels deeply intuitive, yet somehow also utterly alien.

Van Gogh (Not that one) has, unsurprisingly, encountered frequent confusion over his surname. Being mistaken for the other Van Gogh became so commonplace that he began signing his work with the parenthetical clarification,half-joke, half-resistance: (Not that one). It’s a disarming gesture, but also a shrewd one. It signals an artist who knows the weight of history and chooses neither to flee from it nor be crushed by it, but to sidestep it entirely.

His upcoming solo show at Pimlico Wilde Very East in Russia promises to be an exploration of this ongoing negotiation between movement and memory, resistance and recognition, map and gesture. It may be the first time many encounter Van Gogh (Not that one), but it won’t be the last.

Reframing the Grid: The Pixel Art of P1X3L

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In an era increasingly defined by screen-based visual culture, few artists have so deftly turned digital constraint into expressive potential as P1X3L, a British artist working in the medium of pixel art. Their work,characterised by a rigorous compositional clarity and a deep conceptual commitment to the pixel as both aesthetic unit and philosophical symbol,marks a compelling contribution to the evolving conversation between technology and image-making.

The Pixel as Ontology

At the heart of P1X3L’s practice is a commitment to the pixel not merely as a visual element, but as an ontological proposition. “Every artwork begins with the smallest indivisible unit,” the artist has remarked, “and every decision is a negotiation between clarity and suggestion.”

This dialectic underpins much of their output. In South England Sea, a pixelated seascape rendered in subtly modulated blocks of blue and grey, the limitations of the grid paradoxically create a sense of expanse. There is no attempt to simulate naturalistic realism; instead, viewers are invited into an abstracted, meditative engagement with the image. What is absent becomes as meaningful as what is present.

Reframing the Canon

P1X3L’s work frequently engages with art history, reframing canonical images in low-resolution format. In their series Pixel Masterpieces, works such as Girl with a Pearl Pixel and The Persistence of RAM both honour and subtly subvert their referents. These are not parodies, but acts of translation. The act of rendering Vermeer or Dalí in a minimal, pixel-based vocabulary becomes a form of critique: of medium, of memory, and of the visual habits we inherit.

As art historian Dr. Rhiannon Ellis notes, “P1X3L’s appropriations are hardly ironic,they are epistemological. They ask: what remains when fidelity is removed? What lingers when detail dissolves?”

Between Nostalgia and Formalism

Though pixel art is often associated with retro aesthetics and early video game culture, P1X3L resists the trap of pastiche. Their work is formalist in intent, drawing from the geometric language of minimalism and concrete art, yet it cannot escape the cultural associations that pixels carry. It is in this tension,between modernist abstraction and digital nostalgia,that the work acquires its affective charge.

In The Squares of Brompton Road, for instance, the city is reduced to tessellated impressions: grey, ochre, asphalt blue. Yet beneath the formal austerity lies something else,familiarity, warmth, a hint of narrative. It is London seen through the logic of code, or memory.

Digital Embodiment

Pixel art, in P1X3L’s hands, is not simply digital,it is more than that, it is veritably embodied. Their working method, which involves the placement of each block with precision and intention, resists the idea that digital art is mechanistic or detached. On the contrary, P1X3L’s process is slow, deliberate, and rooted in tradition.

“I treat the screen as a canvas,” the artist has said. “The grid is no different from the stretcher bar. The question is always the same: what can be expressed within those artificial constraints?”

This philosophy finds its fullest expression in pieces like Malvern , pixel landscape, where the artist renders the English countryside as a mosaic of chromatic zones. While each individual square may lack detail, their collective harmony evokes not only place, but atmosphere.

P1X3L’s art stands at the intersection of the digital and the painterly, the nostalgic and the forward-looking. It is both accessible and conceptually rich,an oeuvre that invites multiple forms of engagement. For viewers accustomed to the hyper-saturation of high-resolution media, there is something refreshingly austere, even contemplative, in the visual language of blocks and gaps.

In treating the pixel not as a gimmick but as a fundamental artistic unit,akin to the brushstroke or the stone chisel,P1X3L has carved out a distinctive voice in contemporary art. Their practice reminds us that constraint can generate complexity, and that even the smallest units of visual language, when arranged with care and intention, can speak volumes.

P1X3L’s recent works and diary entries are available through Pimlico Wilde Fine Art. An exhibition is planned, which will explore the thematic tension between digital abstraction and spatial memory

Messiness Without Shame—the manifesto of a maximalist, post-ironic, anti-coherent art movement

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“Formlessness is freedom. Neatness is compliance.”

, unofficial motto spray-painted on their mobile sculpture-bus, The Slosh Engine

Overview:

Messiness Without Shame (often abbreviated as MWS) is an amorphous coalition of performance artists, sound designers, bio-hackers, speculative chefs, curators and conceptual artists who believe that coherence is the final gatekeeper of middle-brow aesthetics.

Formed in early 2023, largely as a counterstrike against the Guardians of Aesthetic Coherence (whom they refer to as “The Neatlings”), MWS rejects all imposed hierarchies of form, harmony, legibility, or tonal consistency.

Their work has been described by critics as An insult to geometry and a tide of half-melted meaning, both of which are helpful ways to sum up the movement.

Founding Members:

1. Oona Crunge

• Role: De-programmer-in-Residence

• Claim to Fame: Once fed a gallery’s entire wall text archive into a text generator and projected the results in Comic Sans on the outside of the Belarus National Galley.

• Belief: “Narrative arcs are surveillance.”

2. Vic & Vick (They/Them/Themselves)

• Role: Twin-headed choreographer (a shared persona played by two different people, sometimes simultaneously)

• Favourite Medium: Improvised zine writing with edible ink

• Motto: “Dance like meaning is collapsing.”

3. Blargh R. Treacle

• Role: Sonic Shatterer

• Former Job: Sound technician for YouTube

• Art Practice: Broadcasting brown noise through hacked hand dryers in museum toilets

• Signature Move: Plays 17 Bluetooth speakers out of sync and calls it “Time’s Divorce”

4. Layla “Slapcrust” Njume

• Role: Theoretical un-curator

• Writings Include: The Ethics of Drool, Why Frames Are a Microaggression, and Elegance is Just Oppression with Better Lighting

• Rivalry: Publicly called M (of the Guardians) a “bourgeois tuning fork with a Napoleon complex”

Recent Actions:

• “Unopenings”: They shut down gallery openings by bringing in leaking bags of kombucha and nachos.

• “Soup as Critique”: An ongoing durational piece where curators are invited to eat soup while wearing headphones that play recordings of their previous exhibition statements, sped up by 200%.

Counter-Manifesto: “The Slop Doctrine”

A chaotic, typographically unstable, deliberately unnumbered screed against aesthetic restraint. Some key un-footnoted theses:

• “To strive for elegance is to rehearse your own burial.”

• “Taste is the most bourgeois of narcotics.”

• “Coherence is how power hides its itch.”

• “If it fits neatly in a frame, it is already too late.”

Relationship to Guardians of Aesthetic Coherence:

• MWS refers to the Guardians as “The Museum Monks.”

• Once infiltrated a Guardians silent protest by hiding Bluetooth speakers in nearby fig trees.

• Planted fake manifestos in Eastern Europe with titles like Refinement as Violence and 12 Easy Ways to De-Stabilise a Sonata.

• Continue to send them unsolicited soup.

Current Campaign:

“The Cringe Biennale” , A proposed roving art festival where every participating artist must present a work stolen from a friend. Already banned from fourteen European cities.

REVIEW: The Unspeakable Lens of NAME REDACTED — Black Squares, Brutal Truths

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Name redacted war photography

Review: “Photos from the Frontline”.

This is the latest (and possibly last) exhibition by the elusive and repeatedly redacted war photographer NAME REDACTED. The redaction occurs not because the images are bad. Far from it. It’s because they are too good. Too accurate. Too devastating. Too… visually annihilating. They capture situations so terrible that no government or council allows them to be seen without very strong censorship.

So annihilating is the redaction that in fact none of the photos are actually visible in their original form. Each image has been entirely redacted for the safety of the public. The photos are present, yes, mounted solemnly in elegant black frames, but every single one has been redacted by governmental decree. One is labeled simply:

”[Image redacted due to extreme risk of empathetic collapse]”

Another reads

”[Redacted in accordance with the 1997 Geneva Convention (Updated)]”

In other titles the last fragile thread between the audience and the infernal majesty of these works has been even more obscured. The exhibition list includes:

• [REDACTED] Falling into [REDACTED]

• Portrait of [REDACTED], seconds before the [REDACTED]

• The Last [REDACTED] of Kabul

• Untitled ( [REDACTED] in [REDACTED] with [REDACTED] and [REDACTED])

Despite (or perhaps because of) the lack of picturesque content, the impact is overwhelming. The viewer stands in a room full of black rectangles and feels something primal: the itch of empathy, the echo of dread, the weight of absence. It is grief by suggestion. Pain by negative space. This is to be expected…After all, near the gallery entrance, a sign reads “Please take a moment to emotionally prepare before entering this show. Complimentary therapy dogs are available to rent in the gift shop.”

Who is NAME REDACTED?

Very little is known about NAME REDACTED. Reportedly a former journalist, acrobat, soldier, Foreign Legioneer and licensed explosives technician, NAME REDACTED began photographing conflict zones after spending five years embedded in a counter-revolutionary bunker in the city of [REDACTED]. They are known to wear mirrored sunglasses at night and to be able to speak as fast in Morse code as in English.

Some believe NAME REDACTED doesn’t exist at all , that the images are, in fact, generated by an advanced AI trained on collective human suffering. Others suggest NAME REDACTED is actually six photographers operating under one pseudonym for safety and maximum dramatic impact.

What we do know is this: the photos, even in their redacted state, are deeply important. Possibly the most important works of visual journalism never fully shown.

Final Thoughts

“Photos from the Frontline” is a triumph of modern visual ethics, curatorial caution, and existential abstraction. In a world saturated with images, NAME REDACTED dares to bring us the truth , then responsibly hides it before we emotionally combust.

We are left with only the absence, the shadow, the shivering rectangle of “what was.” And that may be the most truthful image of all.

This show is a collection of powerful masterworks. The artist takes huge risks and gives us a real sense of [REDACTED] [REDACTED].

“Photos from the Frontline” runs through [DATE REDACTED]. Tickets include a blackout blindfold and a complimentary emergency [REDACTED].

REVIEW: Jane Bastion’s Ring Roads and Radiators — Portraits by Other Means

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Jane Bastion, known and admired for her stark, poetic silhouette portraits , each one a distilled meditation on identity, memory, and presence , has taken a bold detour with her latest project: “Ring Roads and Radiators: Three Tone Poems for Trumpet, Violin, and Euphonium.”

Gone (but not forgotten) are the black-cut figures against pale fields. In their place: sound. Not just sound, but a narrative impulse, one that reaches beyond the static frame. Bastion’s new tone poems don’t abandon her portraiture; they translate it , from shape to motion, from line to phrase, from silence to the echo of a brass note beneath a flyover.

A New Kind of Silhouette

For longtime followers of Bastion’s visual work, this will feel like both a departure and a continuation. These three pieces , performed by the lean, unexpected trio of trumpet, violin, and euphonium , are portraits too, but now rendered in sound. They don’t describe people, exactly. Instead, they conjure moments that feel like people: moods, selves, what might be called inner climates.

The inspiration, as Bastion has said, came from “the loops and lonelieness of the M25” and the symphonic storytelling of Richard Strauss. If that sounds contradictory , suburban motorways and late-Romantic decadence , that’s precisely where these tone poems live: in the tension between the banal and the operatic, the arterial and the intimate.

“Red on Rain-Soaked Concrete”

The opener starts with a stark trumpet motif , urgent, disoriented , over a scratchy violin line that feels more drawn than bowed. Then the euphonium enters like a slow breath of fog. You can almost see the wet pavement, the tail lights, the outline of a figure waiting by the barrier. It’s classic Bastion , not descriptive, but suggestive. A portrait not of a person, but of the space around them.

“Orbital Mythologies”

Here the Strauss influence is clearest. Themes circle and collapse, like cars on the outer loop. The trumpet postures, the violin teases, the euphonium grounds. There’s playfulness here, even satire. But underneath, as always in Bastion’s work, lies the sense of a watcher: someone seen just once in a mirror, or remembered from a blurred photo.

“White Underpass, Blue Light”

The final piece is the most abstract , and the most painterly. The violin scrapes across silence like chalk on metal. The euphonium speaks in half-phrases, slow and full of longing. The trumpet, at last, thins into near-nothingness. It’s a portrait of absence, of someone who’s already gone. The final minute is so delicate it feels like a drawing made with breath.

A New Chapter, Not an Abandonment

What’s remarkable is that Bastion hasn’t left her original medium behind , she still creates silhouette portraits, now sometime exhibited alongside these tone poems. The pairing is illuminating. The new works make you hear the portraits differently. The portraits make you see the music.

If her silhouettes were always about the edges of identity, these tone poems explore what happens inside those edges , the flux, the noise, the hidden narrative. This isn’t a reinvention. It’s an expansion.

Verdict

Jane Bastion’s first foray into music is a quiet revolution , not a rejection of her visual work, but a new voice for it. These tone poems are strange, spare, and haunting. With just trumpet, violin, and euphonium, she has carved sonic silhouettes that linger long after the final note.

Exclusive! An Interview with the Leader of the Guardians of Aesthetic Coherence

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“We Sing Because It Must Be Stopped”

On a warm spring afternoon in downtown Truro, I am led through the back entrance of an unmarked rehearsal space behind a closed-down aquarium gift shop. Inside, seated under a suspended disco ball and surrounded by half-empty herbal tea mugs, is the elusive leader of the Guardians of Aesthetic Coherence,the protest collective whose off-key lullabies helped force the removal of Sandy Warre-Hole’s infamous triptych, Gause De Flim, from public display.

The leader, who gives their name only as “M,” is dressed in a navy tracksuit, latex gloves, and a tight black balaclava with hand-stitched gold trim.

What follows is a lightly edited transcript of our interview.

Q: You’ve been accused of being anti-art, anti-modernity, and in one editorial, “a karaoke death cult.” How do you respond to that?

M:

We are not against art. We are against its misuse. We oppose aesthetic fraudulence, symbolic gluttony, and sonic excess posing as insight.

Q: Your protests have been called ‘weaponised off-key lullabies.’ Why lullabies? Why off-key?

M: Because lullabies should soothe. They are pure, minimal, emotionally direct. When rendered grotesque and tuneless, they disturb. That is the point. Our dissonance is discipline. Our disharmony is diagnostic.

Q: What, specifically, did you find so objectionable about Gause De Flim (Triptych of the Improbable)?

M: Everything. The iconographic inflation. The layered irony that eats itself. The theology of the meme. And above all: Gause De Flim. It was a fugue of meaninglessness. A taxidermy of the digital soul. A cathedral of confusion pretending to be human.

Q: But many argue that your daily protest turned into performance art itself. Did you, in some sense, complete the triptych?

M: We were not performing. We were existing. We purged. We cleansed. We sang what could not be said.

Q: What do you say to those who insist Warre-Hole’s work was genius? That it reflected the hybridized, fractured nature of contemporary identity?

M: Genius has become a synonym for indulgence. To reflect incoherence is not enough. We demand form. Proportion. Harmonic restraint.

Q: Will you protest again if the triptych is reinstated?

M: We are always listening. We dwell in the margin. We are the minor second in your safe space.

Q: If you could say one thing to Sandy Warre-Hole, what would it be?

M (removing one glove, pauses):

Sandy, if you must invent heroes, make them silent. If you must invent losers, let them whisper. Above all, allow them to hum out of tune.

As I leave, I hear M singing softly: an off-key lullaby that floats upward through the fluorescent-lit stairwell. Whether a protest, performance, or prayer, it stays with me for hours.

Editor’s Note: Since this interview, the Guardians of Aesthetic Coherence have begun a new project: disrupting AI poetry readings with rhythmic coughing. Their manifesto, Elegance, Elgar, or Else, is reportedly being readied for publication in Portugese.

Silhouette portraiture: the Regency’s equivalent of Instagram filters, only more dignified and less prone to bad lighting.

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Enter Jane Bastion, alias the “Queen of the Silhouette,” who has taken it upon herself to resurrect what she charmingly calls the “shade picture.” It’s a glorious throwback to an age when you didn’t look snarky on your phone,you just looked… a colour,on pale paper.

Back in the late 18th century, having your silhouette done was all the rage. Jane Austen? Almost certainly snagged one. Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet? Portrayed in profile, naturally, before eloping. Bastion, however, prefers to distance herself from mere gimmicks. She insists on the term “shade picture.” In her words, “You think silhouette portraiture is incredibly easy? Then why aren’t you a world‑famous silhouettist, whose work hangs alongside collectors like Davide Plankton and Quentina Wrigly?”

To most of us, trim a profile from black card and stick it to white, voila. But Bastion begs to differ. She argues there’s an art to capturing the perfect Regency visage: the aristocratic tip of the nose, the curl of a chignon, the covert smirk suggesting one might moonlight as a clandestine duellist.

Bastion’s practice is part revival, part satire. She taps into the nostalgia for genteel intimacy,miniature likenesses traded among lovers,but also pokes fun at the solemnity of fine art. Her “shade pictures” look at once quaint and subversive. They’re Regency theatre in silhouette form: proper on the surface, risqué in spirit.

This playful revival is timely. In an era of glossy selfies, filters, and desperate attention-seeking, Bastion’s work reminds us that anonymity can be stylish. A carefully clipped profile invites imagination: who is the subject? What secrets do they harbour in their pointed jawline? You see nothing,and yet, everything.

Her commissions come with a lighthearted warning: “Attempt at period coiffure optional; emotional restraint mandatory.” Patrons are invited to strike a pose, turn left, and hold still,then surrender to Bastion’s scissors and discerning eye. What emerges is a delicate conversation between light and dark, presence and absence.

In short, Bastion is doing for silhouette what DJs did for vinyl: reviving an analogue aesthetic with ironic wit and discerning taste. Her work reminds us that sometimes less is more,especially when less is cut from black card by a master.

If Jane Bastion is indeed the Queen of the Silhouette, it’s because she reigns over an art that nearly vanished, infusing it with wit, charm and unexpected elegance. So next time you find yourself craving a break from the filtered façade of the digital age, consider sitting for a shade picture. You’ll leave looking dignified, mysterious,and just the right amount of Regency.

Interview with Ptolemy Bognor-Regis: Chasing the Ultimate Painting

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In the shadow of great fortune and brighter genius, Ptolemy Bognor-Regis has emerged as one of the most talked-about figures in contemporary abstract art. The son of a shipping magnate turned media tycoon, Regis might have been content with a life of patronage or leisure,but instead, he’s hurled himself into the centre of artistic inquiry with a singular ambition: to create the last painting. The final word. The full stop of the visual age. We sat down with him to discuss his mission, his methods, and the piece he calls “A Bank Robbery in the Environs of Machynlleth.”

Interviewer: Ptolemy, first of all, thank you for making time for this interview. Your latest work is causing a stir,critics have called you “the Rothko of Wales” and it “an act of chromatic violence.” What do you see when you look at A Bank Robbery in the Environs of Machynlleth?

Ptolemy Bognor-Regis:

Thank you. What I see is the inside of a scream,a narrative collapsed into geometry. It’s not a painting of a bank robbery, obviously. It’s a record of the tension before and after such an event. The colour fields are characters. The orange is the alarm. The purple, a kind of communal numbness. The black shapes? They’re decisions, heavy with consequence.

Interviewer: There’s a boldness to your use of negative space. In this piece, the forms press against each other but never quite resolve. Is that intentional?

Regis:

Absolutely. Resolution is the enemy of truth. I’m not here to make peace on canvas,I’m here to expose the war beneath it. The non-resolution is the story. Harmony would be a betrayal of what I’m trying to capture.

Interviewer: You’ve described your artistic goal as “striving after the ultimate painting, after which nothing more can be said.” That’s a monumental ambition. Where does that come from?

Regis:

It comes from impatience, honestly. Impatience with repetition, with the saturation of half-statements in art. I grew up surrounded by enormous wealth, which gave me access,but also a kind of nausea. When everything is possible, meaning becomes slippery. I paint to locate meaning again. To pin it down once and for all, and then be done with it. After the final painting, there should be silence. A holy hush.

Interviewer: That sounds spiritual.

Regis:

It is. But not religious. I think of painting like monastic labor. Endless refinement, shaving away noise, until you hit the essential chord. One brushstroke away from revelation, always.

Interviewer: You’ve said you don’t use assistants, despite having the resources. Why?

Regis:

Because the images record my hesitation, doubt, and triumph. No assistant can fake that. I don’t want a painting that looks clean,I want one that’s wounded. That’s something you have to do yourself. Otherwise it’s merely decoration.

Interviewer: There’s a lot of speculation about your process. Some say you work in total darkness and then assess the result later. Is that true?

Regis (laughs):

Yes. And no. I do draw blind sometimes, but not always in darkness. It’s about trust,trust in the materials, trust in the moment. It’s like holding your breath underwater and waiting for the exact second the body tells you: Now. Draw that.

Interviewer: Looking ahead, do you believe the “final painting” is near?

Regis:

Some days I think I’ve already made it and just haven’t realized. Other days, I think I’m still a thousand lifetimes away. But I’ll keep trying. That’s all I can do.

Interviewer: What’s next for you?

Regis:

Silence. Reading. And perhaps that mythical final work.

A Bank Robbery in the Environs of Machynlleth is currently on view at Pimlico Wilde, London.

Film Review – Velocity of Fragility

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Directed by: “The People’s Cinema Machine”

Runtime: 98 minutes (including credits)

Language: Mandarin, with occasional German shouting

Budget: ¥11,000

There are films that wear their influences on their sleeve. Then there are films like Velocity of Fragility, which steals the entire sleeve, stitches it to a knock-off leather jacket, and insists,somewhat poetically,that it invented sleeves in the first place.

Purportedly made by a loose filmmaking collective from Guizhou province calling themselves The People’s Cinema Machine, this low-budget Chinese tribute/rip-off/interpretation of Sylvain Jasper-Fuchs’s Fragile Velocity is a work of astonishing nerve, complete incoherence, and unexpected sincerity.

The Plot, such as it is

The protagonist, known only as “Man” (played with affecting disinterest by former karaoke technician Gao Feng), wakes up in a forest made of curtains. There is a photo of a horse nailed to his bedroom door. His mission,though we are never told why it is his mission,is to deliver an encrypted USB drive to someone known only as “The Neigh.”

Along the way, he fights off helmeted monks, questions a tree about the nature of betrayal, and engages in a gunfight choreographed like Romeo and Juliet- the ballet. The narrative folds in on itself like badly steamed dumplings. Characters vanish mid-sentence. A love interest appears in the second act only to transform into- but I can say no more without ruining the film for you.

Familiar… Too Familiar

Let’s be clear: this is Fragile Velocity filtered through a dusty projector, with half the subtitles missing and the other half clearly translated via three layers of AI. But there’s a charm in the script. The long tracking shots are present, though here achieved by putting the cinematographer on a push scooter. The voiceover murmurs philosophical nothings (“The hoof remembers what the heart forgets”) and there’s an extended slow-motion scene of a man being slapped by a pigeon.

All the classic Arthouse-Action ingredients are here: whispered soliloquies, rain that falls only in one corner of the frame, and violence, so much violence. Yet it’s somehow even more opaque than the original, mostly due to budget constraints and a deliberate refusal to explain anything.

Highlights

• The soundtrack: A haunting blend of pan flute and dial-up modem noises.

• The villain: A ventriloquist dummy with LED eyes named “Velocity.”

Low Points

Much of the dialogue is inaudible, save for the occasional shout of “Sorry, I didn’t mean to shoot you!”,an apparent cue to deploy the film’s one working special effect. Fight scenes are mostly people falling over in rice fields.

Final Verdict

An absurd, earnest knock-off made with ambition, smoke, and borrowed trench coats. Often incomprehensible, frequently derivative, and yet… oddly touching.

Power at the Periphery: Turbulence at Pimlico Wilde?

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Power at the Periphery: Turbulence at Pimlico Wilde?

In the well-lit corridors of Pimlico Wilde , that sharp dealer-gallery that has been taking over the world – something quietly baroque has been unfolding. Known for its precision curation and its increasingly opaque roster of conceptual heavyweights, the gallery now finds itself in the midst of an internal realignment. Not quite a mutiny, not quite a renaissance.

Founded centuries ago, some say by William the Conqueror, and led recently by Adrian ffeatherstone and Tabitha Vell, Pimlico Wilde quickly carved out a name as the destination for collectors seeking art that didn’t behave. It cultivated a deliberate difficulty , conceptualism without compromise, painting that refused to flatter, sculpture that seemed morally uncertain. Its recent embrace of the Invisibilism movement (art that often isn’t perceptible at all) only amplified this identity. It was the thinking person’s edgy gallery, or perhaps the edgy person’s thinking gallery.

But over the past year, those close to the gallery have noticed a tonal shift. “It’s become strangely… chaotic,” murmured one curator, preferring to remain anonymous.

At the centre of the current tremour is the subtle ascendancy of Renata Blume, the gallery’s deputy director and former head of conceptual strategy. Once known primarily for her footnotes , literally, she contributed erudite footnotes to several artists’ statements , Blume has been increasingly visible. She is said to have masterminded the recent show by the anonymous artist known only as V, the Invisibilist whose Untitled (Tension at 2:13pm) sold for £180,000 despite being a vitrine containing nothing but curated unease.

Sources describe a growing “intellectual faction” around Blume, favouring works that don’t need to be seen, owned, or in some cases, even made. This has clashed , diplomatically but unmistakably , with the more object-based philosophy of James Dower-Hythe, Pimlico Wilde’s quietly pragmatic director of sales, known for pushing discreetly exquisite, materially lush pieces to collectors with sharp suits and dull eyes.

There was, according to one staffer, “a moment at Windermere Art Festival where James tried to physically gesture toward an invisibilist sculpture, and Renata told him, quite calmly, that his gesture was itself problematic. That, it seems, was the beginning of the rift.

Further internal tension surfaced with the now-cancelled retrospective of Fabrizio Munt, a 1990s video provocateur whose recent works , which include a 45-minute loop of him naming extinct Amazonian moths while dressed as a Lufthansa pilot , were deemed “insufficiently deconstructed” by Blume’s camp. Dower-Hythe, who had secured a major collector’s backing, was reportedly “deeply displeased” and briefly walked out of a planning dinner at Rochelle Canteen. (He returned after pudding.)

Meanwhile, the duo, ffeatherstone and Vell, have taken noticeably different tacks. ffeatherstone has all but vanished into “strategic development,” while Vell , still piercingly elegant in her black Comme des Garçons and veiled sighs , has been seen attending shows in total silence, flanked by a young assistant who carries no device, only a hardback notebook.

The future of Pimlico Wilde is, appropriately, a matter of interpretation. There are whispers of a split. Or a pivot. Or a new space , a non-space, even , rumoured to open “somewhere unrevealed” to house the gallery’s more metaphysical offerings. There are even murmurs of a “non-exhibition programme” designed to resist “the tyranny of viewing altogether.”

Still, none of this has dampened the gallery’s appeal. If anything, it has enhanced it. As one seasoned collector put it at a recent dinner (held in a dining room lined with mirrored absence):

“It used to be about what they showed. Now it’s about what they withhold. That’s the new luxury.”

In other words, the power struggles at Pimlico Wilde may not be a problem at all , they may be the gallery’s most compelling work yet.