Art Interviews

Whispering to the Marble: A Conversation with Henri Pagnol

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Whispering to the Marble: A Conversation with Henri Pagnol

By Élise Durante

In his Marseille studio, Henri Pagnol greets me not with a handshake but with a hush. “You don’t begin with words,” he says, “you begin with the air between them.” For nearly five decades, Pagnol has pursued one of the less popular practices in contemporary art: whispering into objects until they change. I sat down,quietly,with the man some critics have dubbed ‘the sculptor of patience.’

Élise Durant: Monsieur Pagnol, your medium is… breath. That seems, let’s be honest, both poetic and, can I say, a little absurd.

Henri Pagnol: Absurd? Perhaps. But so is chiseling marble with a hammer. One is brute force; the other is persistence. Which is more absurd: cracking a stone in a day, or convincing it,over decades,that it wishes to soften?

Durant: Do you truly believe your whispers alter these objects?

Pagnol: Believe? I do not need to believe. I see the surface dull, I see the sheen vanish, I see the glass fog permanently. Science would call it moisture and time. I call it intimacy.

Durant: Some would argue that’s simply corrosion, not art.

Pagnol: Yes, and some argue that Cézanne was simply putting fruit on a table. Art begins when corrosion is chosen, repeated, and loved.

Durant: Why whisper, though? Why not speak, sing, or shout?

Pagnol: A whisper is a confession without spectacle. Shouting scars. Whispering persuades. The marble must feel I am not threatening it.

Durant: Do you choose particular texts to whisper to each object?

Pagnol: Always. Poems, prayers, fragments of manifestos, recipes, secrets I am ashamed of. Words shape the mouth differently. A poem by Rilke softens copper in a way that a shopping list cannot.

Durant: There is a rumour that museums give you after-hours access to continue whispering into your exhibited works.

Pagnol: Rumour? Fact! I visit my pieces like others visit relatives in hospital. They must not feel abandoned.

Durant: Isn’t there a certain vanity in thinking objects respond to your voice?

Pagnol: Vanity is chiseling your name into stone. Humility is knowing the stone will erase you eventually,but still speaking to it as an equal.

Durant: You’ve been called “the slowest sculptor alive.”

Pagnol: That’s generous. Time does most of the sculpting. I am only the methodology.

Durant: What would you say to someone who whispers at their coffee mug tomorrow morning and finds nothing has changed?

Pagnol: I would say: whisper longer. Whisper every morning for twenty years. Then lift it in your hand and tell me it does not feel different.

Durant: Do you ever fear that, after all these years, your practice might be dismissed as eccentric performance?

Pagnol: Fear? No. A whisper is always dismissed at first. Until one day, you realize it has changed the entire world.

Durant: Last question. If you could whisper into any object in the world, what would it be?

Pagnol: The Liberty Bell in Philadelphia. I would whisper in French, very slowly, until the crack sealed itself,not with bronze, but with silence.

As I leave, Pagnol is already back at work: leaning close to a block of Carrara marble, murmuring syllables so faint I cannot tell if they are words or sighs. The marble does not respond, at least not yet. But the room feels strangely attentive, as though holding its breath.

Interview with Teddy Fairfax on the Occasion of His Arrival at Pimlico Wilde Fine Art Dealers

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Interview with Teddy Fairfax on the Occasion of His Arrival at Pimlico Wilde Fine Art Dealers

Interview by C.H.Mankoly with our new CLO (Collector Liason Officer)

It is an overcast morning in London, the sort of pearlescent light that would have pleased Whistler, and Teddy Fairfax arrives at the gallery precisely on time, carrying neither portfolio nor briefcase but instead a thin, well handled volume of Ruskin essays and a faint expression of amused anticipation. One senses immediately that this is a man for whom art is not a profession so much as an atmosphere.

Interviewer: Teddy, welcome to Pimlico Wilde. There has been considerable curiosity about your arrival. Perhaps we might begin at the beginning. Your background is often described as unusual.

Teddy Fairfax: Unusual is a kind word. I prefer circuitous. I was born into a family that believed dinner conversation should range freely from Byzantine mosaics to the breeding habits of ungulates. Formal education followed at the Courtauld, but my real schooling occurred elsewhere. Auction rooms, alpine slopes, the backs of elephants, occasionally all at once in spirit if not in fact.

Interviewer: You mention elephants with remarkable calm. You are, I believe, an elephant poloist.

Teddy Fairfax: Former, alas. Elephant polo is a discipline that encourages both humility and a robust respect for scale. One learns quickly that elegance is relative. The game taught me much about balance, not merely physical balance but social balance. How to read temperament. How to persuade a very large being to participate in something it is not entirely designed for. These skills translate surprisingly well to the world of collecting.

Interviewer: Your reputation for improbable physical feats precedes you. There is the matter of Ben Nevis.

Teddy Fairfax: Ah yes. I climbed Ben Nevis carrying a full size reproduction of a Turner sketchbook, framed. It was a wager made over lunch and therefore had to be honoured. The ascent was completed at dawn, backwards for the final third, in order to test perception and endurance. I would not necessarily recommend it, though the view, both literal and metaphoric, was clarifying.

Interviewer: This seems to reflect a broader philosophy.

Teddy Fairfax: Quite. Art history itself is a long backward ascent. One understands the present by facing the past and feeling for footholds. Collecting is similar. The best collections are not accumulations but conversations conducted across centuries.

Interviewer: Before Pimlico Wilde, your career encompassed some notable moments.

Teddy Fairfax: I have been fortunate. I have handled works that insisted on discretion. I once concluded a significant private sale while skiing in Davos, negotiating by telephone with one glove removed, the buyer somewhere below me on the same run, unknown to both of us at the time.

Interviewer: Your hobbies suggest a life lived at an oblique angle to convention.

Teddy Fairfax: I am fond of long lunches. Proper ones. The sort that begin with a question and end with a multi-million pound decision. I cultivate bonsai olive trees which teaches patience and proportion. I cycle slowly along the Thames with books that are too heavy to justify the effort. I collect marginalia. Notes in books tell you more about history than the books themselves.

Interviewer: And now Pimlico Wilde. What drew you here.

Teddy Fairfax: Pimlico Wilde understands that seriousness need not announce itself loudly. There is wit here, but it is in service of discernment. The artists, the collectors, the conversations all operate with a certain cultivated looseness. I find that congenial. My role is to listen, to interpret, and occasionally to suggest.

Interviewer: Finally, what should collectors expect from you.

Teddy Fairfax: Attention. Time. Curiosity. And possibly an invitation to lunch. Art deserves nothing less than patience and pleasure in equal measure. If one can acquire a work while digesting a good pudding and a better idea, so much the better.

As Teddy Fairfax departs, one is left with the sense that Pimlico Wilde has not merely acquired a Collector Liaison Officer but rather installed a roaming intellectual weather system. He brings with him stories, stamina, and a willingness to take the long way up the mountain, backwards if necessary, provided the view is worth it and lunch awaits at the summit.

Great Artists: Marcellus Vire

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Great Artists: Marcellus Vire

The Salt of Memory: The Enduring Tear Art of Marcellus Vire

In a century increasingly obsessed with speed, spectacle, and permanence, the work of Marcellus Vire (b. 1938) offers a quiet, almost monastic rebuttal. For over six decades, the Franco-Italian conceptual artist has worked with a medium that is both profoundly human and radically ephemeral: tears. Through this most personal of substances, Vire has constructed an oeuvre that merges performance, ritual, alchemical experimentation, and emotional endurance.

Today, at 87, Vire remains an elusive but revered figure in the international art world,an artist who has turned grief, memory, and truth into his palette. His influence spans from relational aesthetics to contemporary performance art, yet his practice remains uniquely his own: intimate, uncommodifiable, and fundamentally unphotographable.

Beginnings: Mourning as Material

Born Marcello Virenzi in Turin in 1938, Vire’s formative years were shaped by postwar scarcity and private tragedy. His twin brother, Luca, died at age seven in a drowning accident,a trauma Vire has cited as his “first and most persistent wound.” Raised in a devout Catholic household, Vire was exposed early to ritual, lamentation, and the idea of bodily sacrifice as symbolic communication.

Trained at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence in the late 1950s, Vire quickly abandoned conventional media. “Clay forgets nothing,” he once wrote, “but tears forget everything,and still leave behind salt.” His first recorded experiment with tears as a medium occurred in 1961, when he captured a single drop on untreated linen, creating what he called a “transparent wound.”

Method and Medium: Tears as Language

Vire’s process is both conceptual and bodily. His tears are induced through a range of practices: sustained memory recall, recitation of poetry, exposure to certain scents (especially bergamot and violet, which he associates with his great-grand-mother), and long periods of silence. Once shed, the tears are captured,on paper, linen, or blown glass,and documented with meticulous care.

Over time, he developed what he terms a “taxonomy of grief,” in which tears are categorized by emotional origin: sorrow, joy, frustration, mourning, and release. His seminal Cartographies Salées series (1982,1995) consisted of over 200 small panels, each stained with a single teardrop and inscribed with the memory that provoked it. The works were displayed in dim, humidity-controlled rooms, the salt traces visible only from certain angles.

Rather than treating the tear as a symbolic gesture, Vire regards it as a material index of interior experience. His practice draws from both Catholic relic tradition and Eastern notions of impermanence. In this sense, his work is more alchemical than performative, concerned less with visibility than with transmutation.

The Ethics of Witnessing

Though often labeled a performance artist, Vire resists theatricality. His “weeping sessions”,held privately or with a small audience,are slow, meditative events in which silence is essential. He weeps, collects, documents. The audience, if present, is instructed not to intervene, applaud, or speak.

Critics have at times accused him of fetishizing suffering or emotional exhibitionism. Vire is unbothered. “I do not cry for them,” he told philosopher Claire Guérin in a rare 2014 interview. “I cry with them,though they may not yet know it.” In this framing, his work becomes less self-revelation and more radical empathy.

Contemporary Relevance and Late Recognition

For most of the 20th century, Vire’s refusal to commercialize his work,he has never allowed a tear-based piece to be sold,rendered him marginal to the market-driven art world. However, with the rise of affect theory, trauma studies, and post-materialist aesthetics, his work has come under renewed scholarly and curatorial interest.

In 2018, the Palais de Tokyo in Paris mounted Les Larmes du Temps, a landmark retrospective of Vire’s output from 1961 to the present. The show included reconstructed weeping sessions, vitrines of tear-stained cloths, and audio diaries recorded during grief rituals. A companion symposium brought together scholars in philosophy, neuroscience, and art theory to discuss his legacy.

Most recently, in 2024, Vire collaborated with olfactory artist Lien Zhang on Eaux Perdues, a scent-based installation in Marseille evoking the emotional conditions under which tears are produced. The installation featured a climate-controlled chamber where humidity, smell, and silence coalesced into an invisible portrait of mourning.

Philosophy of the Invisible

Vire’s ongoing notebooks, Notules sur la douleur, now spanning more than 20 volumes, contain aphorisms, chemical notes, and philosophical meditations on the ethics of sadness. A typical entry:

“Tears are not weakness. They are salt seeking form.”

He has never taught formally, never operated a studio, and declines most interviews. Yet he has quietly mentored a generation of affective and performance artists, including Maya Orellana, André Lutz, and the collective Corps Flottants, who credit him with opening emotional labor as a legitimate artistic site.

Final Thoughts: The Art of Evaporation

Now living in quiet seclusion near Avignon, Vire continues to practice daily. His most recent project, Prière de Disparaître (2025,), is a series of salt-dried tear medallions embedded in limestone and returned to the sea,“so that what was felt returns to what cannot be seen.”

In an era of ever-expanding digital visibility and emotional commodification, Vire’s work offers something rare: a poetics of feeling that resists spectacle. He does not document pain. He distills it. And in the process, he teaches us that even the most fleeting gesture,a tear,can be shaped into something enduring.

An Introduction to Art World Luminaries- Dr. Felicity Gudgeon

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An Introduction to Art World Luminaries- Dr. Felicity Gudgeon

Tracing the Echoes of the Past: My Life in Medieval Art

By Dr. Felicity Gudgeon, University of Littlehampton

When people ask me what drew me to medieval art, I often say that I never quite grew out of the habit of staring too long at the margins of things. As a child, I would linger over the illuminated letters in the family Bible, more interested in the curling foliage and mischievous creatures than the words themselves. That early fascination with the overlooked and the ornamental set me on a path that has carried me from the cloisters of English abbeys to dusty archives in Paris and the hilltop monasteries of Catalonia.

My research focuses on the interplay between image and devotion in late medieval manuscript illumination. For me, these works are not simply beautiful artifacts, but living documents of belief, imagination, and human experience. A gilded miniature is both an object of prayer and a window into the mind of its maker,a balance between the sacred and the earthly. What still amazes me is the sheer inventiveness of artists who often remain anonymous: the rabbit jousting with a snail, the monk distracted by a songbird, the Virgin painted with a tenderness that transcends time.

At the University of Littlehampton, where I lecture in medieval art history, I try to encourage my students to think of art not as something frozen behind museum glass, but as part of a continuum of human expression. Medieval art was vibrant, tactile, and social: manuscripts passed through many hands; stained glass glowed in shifting sunlight; altarpieces witnessed both worship and everyday bustle. To study these works is to reconnect with the pulse of a world at once distant and startlingly familiar.

My career has taken me on some curious adventures. I have found myself climbing a rickety ladder in a Belgian church to examine a fragment of wall painting long hidden by plaster, and squinting under ultraviolet light at a page in Florence to glimpse erased brushstrokes. More recently, I have been collaborating with conservators and digital specialists on ways to virtually “restore” lost colours to manuscripts faded over centuries. The marriage of modern technology and medieval craftsmanship continues to surprise me, and it reminds me that the past is never entirely gone,it waits for us to look carefully enough.

Outside of academic work, I confess I remain a devoted margin-dweller. I collect peculiar medieval beasts in the form of postcards and always have a sketchbook at hand. There is, I think, a joy in following the same curiosity that led scribes to draw owls in monks’ hoods or cats chasing mice among the vines. It keeps the past playful, and in doing so, it keeps it alive.

In the end, my life’s work is not about preserving art in amber but about listening to its echoes,those small, insistent voices that whisper from vellum, stone, and glass. They remind us that the medieval world was never silent, and through them, we are invited to look a little longer at the margins of our own lives.

An Interview with Dafydda ap Gruffydd:“The Art of Going Slowly”

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An Interview with Dafydda ap Gruffydd:“The Art of Going Slowly”

When I meet Dafydda ap Gruffydd, she’s already halfway across the café.

Not in the usual sense. She is literally halfway: mid-step, paused with quiet concentration, as if the act of crossing the floor were a kind of ritual, which for her it is. Her progress is almost imperceptible,glacial, reverent. We do not speak until she has reached the table. It takes nine minutes.

This, I quickly learn, is typical of Dafydda.

Born on the remote Welsh island of Skomer, Dafydda ap Gruffydd is a land artist, endurance walker, and,more recently,a practitioner of what she terms “contemplative parkour.” Her practice defies categorisation. With a reputation for impermanence and a philosophy shaped as much by folklore as by Fluxus, Dafydda is one of the few artists whose greatest work may well be her own movement through the world.

Her flip-flops from her twin circumnavigations of the globe are now under glass in her local museum in Byllwngwest. But Dafydda herself remains defiantly uncontainable. Her book, How to Walk Across Your Living Room by Someone Who Has Walked Across Their Living Room, has already become a minor cult object in collector circles.

Peri: You once described walking as your primary material. What does that mean in practice?

Dafydda ap Gruffydd:

Most materials are held or shaped,clay, metal, even paint. I suppose my material holds me. I walk not to get anywhere, but to embed myself in the act of moving. Each step is a mark. Each pause is an erasure. I’m trying to walk so lightly that I un-walk the space behind me.

Peri: You’re known for your slowness. Your walk from Land’s End to Bristol took several months, at a precise 1.3 miles per hour. Why that pace?

Dafydda:

Because that’s how fast the heart of the land beats. Any faster, and you miss it. I chose 1.3 mph after calibrating my breath with the flight path of a red kite I saw circling above Gwent. It’s not science, but it’s not not science either.

Peri: Your work resists documentation. You don’t photograph your installations. You rarely title your performances. Is this a reaction to the art market?

Dafydda:

Not really. I just think the land remembers things better than we do. Why compete with that? I leave sculptures made of ice, wool, sometimes soil. By the time someone arrives, they’re gone. I don’t call it loss. I call it completion.

Peri: You’ve recently incorporated parkour into your practice, but in a very… Dafydda way. Can you tell us about that?

Dafydda (smiling):

Parkour is usually about efficiency,how to get from A to B using the body’s full potential. I’ve inverted that. I use parkour to get from A to A, slowly, with great care. I once spent three hours gently rolling over a low stone wall in mid Wales. I called it Unnecessary Passage #4. Though, of course, I didn’t write that down.

Peri: You often invoke the Welsh word qwest, which has no English equivalent. Could you expand on that for our readers?

Dafydda:

Qwest is the kind of journey you only begin when the reason for going has already started to dissolve. It’s usually over ten miles. But the distance is less important than the feeling: that you’re walking toward something you’ll never quite find. Most of my work tries to live in that feeling.

Peri: What do you hope people take away from your work,if there’s nothing to take away?

Dafydda:

A sensation, maybe. A new attention to the ground under their feet. The desire to walk out of their front door without a destination. Or just the confidence to cross their living room with ceremony, noticing every step. That’s enough. That’s everything.

Peri: And what’s next?

Dafydda (pauses):

I’ve begun preparing for a new piece: walking backwards from Bristol to the edge of my kitchen. It will likely take the rest of the year. I’ll leave no trace. Hopefully not even a memory.

As we leave the café, I notice Dafydda spending several minutes examining a single paving stone. She crouches, brushes some grit away with her sleeve, then slowly hoists herself onto a low wall,not to leap from it, but to sit. Still. Present.

In a world built on speed, Dafydda ap Gruffydd reminds us that walking can be an act of resistance. Or reverence. Or simply a beautifully obscure reason to keep going.

Signed Collectors’ copies of Dafydda’s book including appendices on long-distance flip flops and living on the road are available from Dafydda via post.

The Voice as Canvas: A Conversation with Callisto Erendira

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Few artists today embody the spirit of intermedial exploration as fluidly as Callisto Erendira. Known throughout the 2010s for her boundary-pushing conceptual installations and para-architectural sculptures, Erendira has, over the last few years, immersed herself in an entirely different kind of construction: opera. Her latest work, The Air Remembers the Mouth, premiered this spring at the Tempelhof Terminal in Berlin, is less a traditional opera than an “architectonics of voice and breath.” We met in a rehearsal space,bare concrete, scattered reeds, a harpsichord ,to discuss her move into opera as medium, not genre.

RENATA EL-AZHAR:

Callisto, many of us still associate your practice with material interventions in space,sheet metal bent like calligraphy, resin slabs embedded with soil. I have to ask, why opera?

CALLISTO ERENDIRA:

Opera, for me, is not an escape from materiality,it’s its sublimation. I often say I haven’t left sculpture; I’ve simply inverted its orientation. The voice is the breath made spatial. What interests me is the opera as a spatial organism, where the architectural body,stage, voice, gesture,becomes a site of invocation rather than representation.

EL-AZHAR:

Do you mean you are treating the voice sculpturally?

ERENDIRA:

Yes. But not only the voice,the conditions of the voice. I’m interested in the sonic theories of Oliver Jeffersen: the way sound moves through air is exactly like pigment moving across a canvas. In The Air Remembers the Mouth, each vocal part is assigned a material analogue. The contralto was paired with basalt powder, the mezzo-soprano with brass dust suspended in glycerin mist. We projected these associations as visual scores in the wings, but never explained them. I wanted the audience to intuit the logic of these breaths.

EL-AZHAR:

There’s a moment in that piece,around the 430-minute mark,where a performer simply exhales for nearly two minutes. No pitch, no language. Can you say a few words about that?

ERENDIRA:

That exhalation is the most “composed” moment in the piece. We rehearsed it for weeks. I wanted to unmoor the audience’s expectation of vocal climax. In operatic tradition, the voice is a vehicle of pathos, of narrative propulsion. I was more interested in how expulsion,of air, of grief, of refusal,can become a kind of anti-narrative. It’s a political gesture. Silence that isn’t mute.

EL-AZHAR:

You mentioned once that opera allows you to “ritualize the failure of language.” That seems paradoxical, given opera’s dependence on libretto.

ERENDIRA:

That’s the paradox I’m trying to inhabit. The libretto for The Air Remembers the Mouth was originally written entirely in glossolalia,non-semantic syllables chosen for their muscular demands on the mouth and larynx. I wasn’t happy with the result; instead I collaborated with a phonetician and a dancer. Meaning was replaced by valency, by the physical torque of speech. The failure of language is precisely where it becomes fertile again.

EL-AZHAR:

There’s a terrifying sense, around the seven hour mark, that you’re invoking ancient rites,opera as séance, almost.

ERENDIRA:

Absolutely. But not in a nostalgic way. I see opera as proto-cinematic, proto-installational. Before screens, before galleries, there were these public orchestrations of myth and affect. I’m not interested in merely reviving that form, but rather in abstracting its impulses. Think of the chorus not as narrators, but as rhythmic tissues. Think of the aria as an open wound.

EL-AZHAR:

Do you consider yourself still a visual artist?

ERENDIRA:

I don’t think in disciplinary terms anymore. Opera is a medium that more easily tolerates contradiction: it is visual, sonic, architectural, affective, intellectual. But I still return to materials. For example, with my next piece, I’m working with broken clarinets cast in salt and embedded into the stage.

EL-AZHAR:

There’s something almost entropic about that. A slow vanishing.

ERENDIRA:

Yes. You could say that entropy is just unobserved form. In which case my job is to make it visible.

Callisto Erendira’s The Air Remembers the Mouth will tour the Pimlico Wilde galleries in Helsinki, São Paulo, and Palermo in late 2025. Her operatic sketches and salt scores will be exhibited at the Palais de Eruminite in November.

INTERVIEW: Graffiti Artist 2Cool on The Permanence of Cool

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A conversation between 2Cool and Esmerelda Pink, Head of People Engineering at Pimlico Wilde

First published in Pimlico Wilde Contemporary Art Annual, Vol. 32 (2025)

Location: The basement gallery at Pimlico Wilde Mayfair.

Time: 3:06am. Esmerelda wears a silk kimono and brogues. 2Cool arrives in jeans, a hoodie, a balaclava, and, of course, a pair of sunglasses.

ESMERELDA PINK:

There’s something deeply attractive about your work , how you build and release the tension between recursion and resistance. Do you see your practice as anti-teleological?

2COOL:

(Laughs)

I mean, I just like drawing the little guy, you know? He’s got a good vibe. I’m spreading a little bit of joy.

ESMERELDA:

Of course , vibe as praxis. But you must be aware of the iconographic weight the image now carries. The Cool Face has become a kind of metonym for 21st Century visual semiotics , a smile with nothing behind it, or perhaps everything.

2COOL:

I just think it looks cool. That’s really where it started. The shades, the hair , that kind of lazy grin? I was sketching one night on a pub napkin and thought, “Yeah, he’s got something.” So I started drawing him. Didn’t stop.

ESMERELDA:

But repetition , that’s where the work becomes critical. Baudrillard would say you’re engaged in simulation: the infinite reproduction of a symbol that has lost its origin.

2COOL:

I don’t know about that, but I do think people like seeing something familiar. Like McDonald’s , same fries, different country. I’m just doing that, but with graffiti.

ESMERELDA:

And yet you refuse to name him.

2COOL:

(Laughs again)

Yeah. Everyone keeps asking. Even my mum’s tried guessing. But nah , some things are better left blank. Keeps it from turning into a brand.

ESMERELDA:

But isn’t it already a brand? You’ve got pieces in Seoul, Nairobi, Ross-on-Wye, Naples and Lingfield. One sold last month for £3,382,000 at Basel. That’s not street art anymore. That’s capital-C Capital. People are investing in you.

2COOL:

No, they are just buying my little dude because they like him. It cheers them up. So much contemporary art is tedious, depressing. My dude is the opposite. Every gets him. It’s mad, right? I was painting this dude on old bins in Peckham ten years ago. Now people are paying six or seven figures to hang him next to a Rothko. Still feels like a prank.

ESMERELDA:

There’s an audacity in that , an anti-institutional institutionalism. You’re playing within the market’s structures while gently mocking them.

2COOL:

I don’t know if I’m mocking anything. I mean, I’m grateful. Pimlico Wilde’s been good to me. It pays the bills, keeps the images flowing. It’s not cheap, flying round the world and drawing, finding new canvases. But yeah, it’s weird. One day I’m getting chased off a train platform, next day someone’s buying a piece I painted in an alley for the price of a flat in Sheffield.

ESMERELDA:

But do you worry about the work’s critical reception? The idea that it’s all just… the same thing over and over?

2COOL:

Honestly? Nah. People overthink it. I get DMs from kids in Caracas who tagged him on their school walls, and I get calls from collectors in Zurich who want a variant in “dusty lilac.” Somehow, it means something to both. I try and please them all, I just want them to look at my guy and smile. That’s enough for me.

ESMERELDA:

And yet the Cool Face , sorry, the Unnamed , has become its own language. Like a visual Esperanto for global detachment. He’s post-political. Or perhaps hyper-political in his refusal to change.

2COOL:

He’s just chill. That’s the whole point. He doesn’t try too hard. People like that. He’s not angry, not fake-happy, just… there. A little smirk in the middle of the mess.

ESMERELDA:

So no plans to “evolve the character”? New expressions? A narrative arc?

2COOL:

Maybe, not yet. Can you imagine how much collectors would pay for the first few versions of a new expression?! I might give one, but he doesn’t need one. The world’s got enough stories. I just give people a face that doesn’t ask for much. He shows up, looks cool, makes them smile, keeps moving.

ESMERELDA:

It’s fascinating , your restraint. In an age of overstimulation, you’ve chosen a singular visual thesis. A recurring moment.

2COOL:

Honestly, I just think it’s funny. All these critics writing essays about a blue blob in shades. That’s performance art, right there.

ESMERELDA:

(Laughs nervously)

Yes, well… we’re all participating in the performance now. And the collectors?

2COOL:

They’re part of it too. They can hang him on a polished wall if they want. Just know I probably painted the same thing on a toilet door in Glasgow last week.

ESMERELDA:

So , where next?

2COOL:

There’s a water tower in Mongolia I’ve been eyeing. Heard it’s hard to get to. That’s got to be the case now, otherwise people just take them down and sell them. Perfect. Right, got to go, I’m going with a few mates to tag…I’d better not say where!

As he leaves, 2Cool slips on his battered sneakers and pulls his hoodie over his balaclava. There’s a faint smell of spray paint and cinnamon chewing gum. No entourage. No signature. Just a faint smile left behind.

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.

The Bin-Gazer of Babylon: Oboe Ngua and the Global Waste Archive

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Some artists search for beauty in sunsets or salvation in the curve of a marble torso. But Oboe Ngua, the world’s only known female bin documentarian, has chosen a different muse: the humble municipal waste receptacle. While others chase light or form, Oboe chases litter. She is on an heroic, and unexpectedly poignant quest,to photograph every bin in the world.

Every. Single. Bin.

Oboe (surname Ngua) began her artistic odyssey sometime in the late 2010s, after what she describes as a “moment of quiet revelation” outside a Little Chef near Loughborough. The sun struck a dented council bin with just the right melancholy,a chiaroscuro of crisp packets and forgotten Monster Munch,and she knew she had found her life’s work. Since then, she has documented over 9,000 bins, across four continents, photographing them with the kind of reverence most reserve for endangered wildlife or church windows.

Her approach is unwavering: one bin, one image, full frontal, unfiltered. No embellishments. Just bin. The results are stark, strangely moving portraits of containers caught somewhere between use and abandonment. Her 2022 show Melancholy Bins of the Danube received critical acclaim, and was promptly banned in Hungary for “aesthetic pessimism.”

Her bins are categorised not only by nation and type,pedal, swing-top, dome-lidded,but also by mood. There are bins of defiance, bins of shame, bins that appear to be whispering something unspeakable into the night. She has spoken, with not a hint of irony, of “the psychological torque of the disused waste bin in Spain.” She refers to landfill sites as “mass graves of late capitalism.” Critics aren’t entirely sure if she’s serious, but she says she is.

Oboe is meticulous. She usually wears gloves. She carries no lighting rig. She once waited four days in a Polish lay-by to snap a recycling bin she had seen on a truck and tracked via Instagram. “It had a story,” she said simply, as if describing a war veteran.

Where most of us see the mundane, Oboe sees monuments to the overlooked. Japanese bins, she tells us, are “modest, a little bashful, with an underlying sense of order.” Italian bins? “Larger than necessary, full of performance, often in relationships with passing pigeons.” English bins? “Perpetually full. Slightly anxious. Trying not to complain.”

To some, her work is a joke stretched to absurdity. But the joke, if there is one and do not forget that she claims there isn’t one, is profound. Duchamp had his urinal. Oboe has the council-issue 240-litre wheelie bin, flanked by crushed Red Bull cans and scented nappy bags. Where Duchamp asked us to rethink sculpture, Oboe asks us to rethink life.

There’s something gently tragic in her quest, too. She knows she’ll never finish. “The world keeps producing rubbish,” she said in a recent panel discussion, “and so I’ll just keep documenting.” When pressed about the futility of the task, she mis-quoted Beckett: “Ever tried harder. Ever failed deeper. No matter. Photograph another bin.”

And so she does. With scissors for tape, a camera for brush, and the courage to look deep into humanity’s polyethylene soul, Oboe gives us a world we’d rather not see,but can’t stop looking at.

Interview with Spen Leopard, collage artist

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Spen Leopard took some time out from collaging the walls of the Queen of Bordeaux’s London residence to speak to us about their career and hopes for the future.

Interviewer (I): Spen, thanks for joining us. To start, tell us a bit about your background.

Spen Leopard (SL): Hello. I grew up in a lighthouse on Scotland’s coast,just me and my parents, who both kept the light burning. That isolation shaped my inner world; for company, I had the crashing waves and my own imagination .

I: That sounds magical. When did you first experiment with collage?

SL: As a child, I’d collect scraps from my parents’ newspaper and old magazines. By my teens I was layering images,boats, birds, torn maps. That formal collage practice didn’t arrive until later, but the habit of curating fragments began in the lighthouse .

I: What themes run through your work?

SL: Central themes are isolation, belonging, and place. Many pieces juxtapose storm-battered nature with human artifacts,ruined piers, handwritten letters, vintage adverts. There’s a tension of fragility and endurance that echoes the lighthouse environment.

I: Walk us through your creative process.

SL: When working non-digitally, I start by gathering ephemera,old postcards, ticket stubs, botanical drawings, bits of text, old menus. Then I lay them onto board, playing with composition until it feels balanced. I glue, layer, and sometimes stitch elements. The result is a textured narrative; each piece reveals stories in the cracks and overlaps.

I: Do you work to a plan or let intuition guide you?

SL: A bit of both. I often begin with a rough idea,a coastal walk or lighthouse motif. But once I’m in the flow,cutting, layering,intuition takes over. It’s like letting the pieces find their own dialogue.

I: How has your upbringing informed your aesthetic?

SL: Living remotely taught me to find value in overlooked details,drip-worn wood on a jetty, a drift seed washed ashore. That attention to detail informs both my material sourcing and my imagery. I want to capture the beauty in the broken and the forgotten.

I: Where do you exhibit your work?

SL: Most recently I had a solo show in Ephesus featuring a nine-piece series called “Beacon Echoes”,all collage-layers of light, rust, shoreline texts. Pimlico Wilde picked up several works and are representing me as well . I’m hoping to exhibit across the UK and beyond in the coming year.

I: What’s next for you?

SL: I’m planning a collaborative series with a poet,combining collage with fragments of marine-inspired verse. I’ll also be sourcing materials from lighthouses across Scotland and Northern England. It’s a way to share both visual and poetic memory.

I: What do you hope viewers take away from your collages?

SL: That art can be woven from small scraps,fragments of time and memory. That there’s poetry in ordinary things if we listen. And that isolation, when deeply attended to, can generate connection.

I: Beautiful. Thanks, Spen, and we look forward to seeing your new work.

SL: Thank you,it’s a pleasure to share a glimpse of my world.