Art theory

Storror, Parkour and the Aesthetics of Urban Transgression

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Storror and the Aesthetics of Urban Transgression

Parkour — the art of moving through the city with maximum speed and economy — arrived in the public imagination as a kind of kinetic sublime: a human body negotiating the modernist geometry of steps, balustrades and façades with a grace and style that repurposes urban architecture. If, in the 1990s and early 2000s, the niche cinema of Jump London and Jump Britain gave freerunning a documentary halo, the UK collective Storror has, in the last decade and a half, translated that aura into a deliberate practice of image-making, brand formation and theatrical risk. Founded in 2010 by a core from Horsham and quickly consolidating into a seven-strong team — Max and Benj Cave, Drew Taylor, Toby Segar, the Powell brothers and Josh Burnett Blake — Storror self-fashioned as both performance troupe and media studio. 

To read Storror from an art-historical angle is to see them as heirs to several modern legacies at once: the Situationist dérive and psychogeography (the practice of drifting through the city to reveal hidden affects), Gordon Matta-Clark’s “anarchitecture” and his radical cuts into urban fabric, and Yves Klein’s performance gestures that turn the body into a metonym for a conceptual project (think Klein’s Leap into the Void). Where Matta-Clark physically excised and reconfigured space to reveal the contingency of architecture, Storror performs the inverse — re-inhabiting and re-narrativising already-constructed sites by putting the mobile body at their visible centre. Their rooftop runs, cliff plunges and dam races are not merely athletic feats: they operate as site-specific propositions that re-distribute the sensory register of place, insisting that urban surfaces be read as scores for choreographic intervention. (One might also invoke Walter Benjamin’s flâneur — now, however, mechanised with GoPros and drones — who does not simply stroll but negotiates spectacle.) 

The collective’s visual grammar is worth close attention. Storror’s films choreograph scale by alternating intimate POV shots with drone panoramas — a dialectic of immersion and overview that produces a peculiar epistemology of the city. These juxtapositions recall the modernist cinema’s oscillation between the subjective and the omniscient, but with a digital twist: the drone’s gaze is not the godlike eye of Eisenstein but a sympathetic camera that valorises skill as knowledge. Their longform documentary projects — including SuperTramps: Thailand and Roof Culture Asia — and their work on commercial film projects have extended parkour into a narrative field of documentary, travelogue and branded spectacle. 

There is a paradox at the heart of Storror’s practice that makes them a singular subject for contemporary aesthetics. On one hand, they celebrate the tactile, improvisatory intelligence of the body: training, repetition, and a kind of vernacular virtuosity that resists institutional capture. On the other, they are consummate producers of image economies: YouTube channels with millions of subscribers, monetised documentaries, collaborations with mainstream cinema. The Situationists warned against the colonising tendencies of spectacle; Storror embodies both the critique and its absorption. Their performances critique cities by revealing alternative uses of built form, but those revelations are themselves re-packaged and monetised within global attention markets. The result is an ambivalent art: emancipatory in gesture, commercial in circulation.

This ambivalence has ethical and political dimensions. Parkour’s iconography — islands of bravado on private rooftops, leaps over voids — can flirt with irresponsibility; controversies have followed, and Storror have had to navigate the consequences of highly visible stunts that brush up against public and protected spaces. The group has, at times, apologised for episodes that landed them in the crosshairs of public opinion, a reminder that the aesthetics of transgression are also regulated by legal and ecological frameworks. 

Seen through the prism of contemporary art theory, Storror’s work also forces a rethinking of the body as medium. Where performance art of the 1970s used endurance to contest institutional norms, Storror uses risk as a communicative strategy in an attention economy: the body signals authenticity because authenticity still registers as capital. Yet there is something stubbornly democratic in their visuality. Their videos are manifestos and travelogues: they invite adaptation and community-building across global parkour networks. In that sense they are less Duchampian readymade than pedagogical practice — a living curriculum for an aspirant urban movement.

Finally, there is an aesthetic pleasure that cannot be reduced to branding: the ecstatic choreography of a group moving as one across thresholds; the paradoxical stillness of the pause before a jump; the suspension of doubt mid-air. These are moments of what Jacques Rancière might call a re-distribution of the sensible, where what is visible (and socially legible) is remade by the skillful transposition of bodies and built environment. Storror’s films make us look twice at banal infrastructures — dam walls, alleyways, rooftops — and ask what else these surfaces could mean. That inquisitiveness, more than any subscriber statistic, is their most artful gift.

Storror’s uneasy diplomacy between insurgent practice and media fluency encapsulates a contemporary condition: the artist-athlete who both resists and leverages spectacle. In doing so they have evolved parkour from a subcultural practice into a form that is at once performative, cinematic and historically legible — a body of work that insists the city is always an artwork in waiting. 

The Marmoset Principle: On the Secret Influence of Small Primates in Baroque Composition

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The Marmoset Principle: On the Secret Influence of Small Primates in Baroque Composition

Though largely absent from standard art historical accounts, the presence—both visual and theoretical—of marmosets in Baroque painting provides an overlooked but crucial insight into compositional logic, theological tension, and the emerging dialectic between wildness and ornament. This essay traces the subtle recurrence of the marmoset as a visual motif, conceptual agent, and interspecies provocateur in the works of Rubens, Caravaggio, and the lesser-known Neapolitan painter Teobaldo Ciconini. It interrogates whether these small primates served merely as exotic punctuation or, more provocatively, as compositional fulcrums upon which the drama of the Baroque pivots.

I. On the Limits of Ornament

In Rubens’ Feast of Herod (1616), a marmoset crouches in the lower left corner, clutching what may be a date or a partially eaten fig. For decades, art historians either failed to mention the creature or referred to it dismissively as “decorative fauna.” Yet its gaze—piercing, peripheral, and accusatory—anchors the scene with a silent commentary. Contemporary Flemish viewers would probably have recognised the marmoset not only as a symbol of foreign decadence but also, in some theological circles, as a figure of misplaced curiosity.

Johannes van Loon’s 1703 treatise De Simia Divina (“On the Divine Monkey”) suggests that small primates were occasionally considered by Jesuit theologians to be “unfallen creatures, incapable of sin yet cursed to mimic it.” This view may seem eccentric today, but Rubens, an erudite painter with deep theological interests, would almost certainly have encountered van Loon’s early essays on simian epistemology.

II. The Diagonal Marmoset

In Caravaggio’s Madonna of the Rosary, the viewer’s attention is famously drawn diagonally across the canvas from Saint Dominic to the Virgin’s outstretched hand. Yet early X-ray scans revealed a previously painted-over element: the faint outline of a small primate—likely a marmoset—positioned where the diagonal line begins. The creature was painted out in a later revision, perhaps at the insistence of the Dominican order, yet its compositional role remained. Some scholars refer to this phenomenon as the “ghost marmoset,” an invisible structuring agent that organizes the viewer’s gaze.

The “Diagonal Marmoset Theory,” first proposed by German art historian Agnes Vollmer in 1962, argues that the inclusion (or exclusion) of small primates served as a covert tool of visual navigation in the Baroque. Though controversial, Vollmer’s theory gained some traction after her death, especially among post-structuralist critics who sought non-human frameworks for understanding painterly intentionality.

III. Teobaldo Ciconini and the Marmoset Sublime

Teobaldo Ciconini (fl. 1679–1708), though largely unknown today, was both a painter and amateur zoologist. His Martyrdom of St. Felicitas (1687) famously includes no fewer than seven marmosets, each in a distinct emotional state. One recoils in horror, another sleeps indifferently, a third climbs the saint’s discarded cloak. The painting is chaotic, nearly unreadable by conventional iconographic standards, yet it generates an inexplicable emotional weight.

Ciconini’s diaries (published posthumously in Palermo, 1811) suggest he believed marmosets to be “spiritual barometers,” capable of intuiting divine proximity. He was reportedly banned from several monastic commissions after insisting on including a live marmoset in liturgical murals.

IV. Toward a Simian Iconology

While the role of cats, dogs, and birds in early modern art has been extensively documented, the presence of monkeys—especially small New World species like the marmoset—remains marginal, possibly due to their inherent ambiguity. They are neither clearly sacred nor profane, neither decorative nor narrative. Yet perhaps it is precisely this ontological slipperiness that made them so attractive to the Baroque mind: creatures of mimicry, agents of disorder, accidental theologians.

Future research will consider whether the marmoset served as a kind of visual philosopher—not merely a silent witness to the passions of the saints and sinners, but a deliberate insertion by painters seeking to destabilise the boundaries between ornament and omen, pet and prophet.

A Riposte to Hedge Fund: Against the Aestheticization of Motor-Racing

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A Riposte to Hedge Fund: Against the Aestheticization of Motor-Racing

by curator Archia Tanz

The recent argument that motor-racing ought to be counted among the fine arts is certainly stimulating, even seductive in its rhetorical flourish. Yet as a curator entrusted with both the preservation and interpretation of works within the canon of art, I must dissent. To conflate motor-racing with the fine arts risks eroding critical distinctions that have been carefully maintained across centuries. The automobile race may be beautiful, thrilling, and culturally significant, but these qualities alone do not suffice to grant it entry into the company of painting, sculpture, music, or theatre.

I. On Movement and Line

The previous Motor-racing is Art essay by Hedge Fund invokes Myron’s Discobolus and the Renaissance’s fascination with motion, suggesting that the racing driver’s trajectory is analogous to the painter’s brushstroke. But here lies a fundamental category error. Myron’s statue embodies movement through stillness, and Leonardo’s sketches transform fleeting corporeal action into a fixed pictorial form. Their artistry resides in representation, in the act of making visible that which escapes perception. Racing, by contrast, does not represent motion—it is motion. However elegant a driver’s line may be, it lacks the mediating activity of artistic representation. To collapse this distinction is to mistake the experience of performance for the creation of art.

II. The Status of the Machine

The claim that racing automobiles are “kinetic sculptures” is likewise problematic. To describe a Ferrari 156 “Sharknose” or Lotus 49 as sculpture is to indulge in metaphor. Their primary ontology is mechanical: they are machines engineered for speed and competitive advantage. When displayed in museums—as at the Museo Ferrari or the Petersen Automotive Museum—they are presented not as works of art but as design artifacts or industrial heritage. The Futurists’ proclamation that a racing car is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace was never meant as sober art criticism but as a polemical gesture against the past.[^1] To adopt it literally risks mistaking manifesto for taxonomy.

III. Ritual and the Question of the Sublime

The ritual drama of the race—its grid, its start, its climax—is undeniably theatrical. Yet theatre itself is a fine art precisely because it articulates narrative, character, and text through performance. Racing lacks these elements. Its drama is contingent upon competition and risk, not artistic intention. Tragedy on the Greek stage derived its force from a script crafted by Sophocles or Euripides, who shaped contingency into meaning. The death of a driver, by contrast, is not an artistic device but a tragic accident. To aestheticize such moments as tragic poetry is to risk trivialising genuine loss under the veil of theory.

IV. On the Gesamtkunstwerk

The suggestion that motor-racing constitutes a Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk likewise stretches the concept to breaking point. Wagner envisioned the integration of existing art forms—music, poetry, dance, scenography—into a unified whole. Racing, however, is not a synthesis of arts but a hybrid of sport, engineering, and spectacle. That these domains produce rich cultural experiences is undeniable, but not every synthesis produces fine art. The Super Bowl halftime show is also a synthesis of choreography, music, design, and ritual, yet few would argue that it belongs to the category of beaux-arts.

V. Criteria for Art

What ultimately distinguishes fine art from sport or entertainment is intentionality. Works of art are created primarily for aesthetic contemplation, not functional outcome. A painting may serve ideological or devotional purposes, but its central condition is its existence as an object of aesthetic form. Racing, by contrast, is defined by its outcome: the victory of one driver over another, the efficiency of machine and team. Its beauty is secondary, an epiphenomenon of function. To call this art would be to render the term meaningless, expanding it to encompass any human endeavor that produces beauty or thrill.

Conclusion

Motor-racing is a powerful cultural practice. It has inspired artists, designers, and writers; it has produced machines of extraordinary elegance; it stages rituals of modernity charged with drama and danger. Yet it is not a fine art. To insist otherwise is to weaken the very concept of art, dissolving its specificity into a vague celebration of “aesthetic experience.” Let us value racing as racing—sublime and spectacular—but let us also preserve the critical distinctions that safeguard the dignity of art.

Notes

[^1]: Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, The Futurist Manifesto, 1909.

Wine: The Medium of Choice for the Avant Garde?

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Wine: The Medium of Choice for the Avant Garde?

The art world, that great machine of invention and secrecy, is alive at present with an unusual rumour. It has been said—quietly, but with enough persistence to warrant attention—that a painter of some repute has begun to work not in oil, nor in acrylic, but in wine.

Sources close to his circle speak of a practice both radical and meticulous: the use of different châteaux and vintages as one would select pigments from a carefully arranged palette. A Margaux for its velvety crimson, a Saint-Émilion for its earthy density, a Sancerre for its pale, almost translucent washes. Each bottle, if the stories are true, is decanted not into a glass but onto the brush, its terroir destined for canvas rather than palate.

The reports, if accurate, carry striking implications. Wine, unlike paint, is unstable, volatile, prone to oxidation. Its colour shifts as it dries, deepening, muting, sometimes blooming into unexpected shades. To paint in wine would be to embrace impermanence itself—to allow the medium’s life cycle to become part of the work. One imagines canvases that change subtly from week to week, their hues maturing or fading like the vintage from which they were born.

At present, no public exhibition has been announced. The few who claim to have seen these works describe them in hushed tones, as if unsure whether to speak of painting or alchemy. What is clear is that, should this practice prove authentic, it may mark one of the most provocative material experiments of recent years: the collision of two deeply French traditions—oenology and painting—on a single surface.

We will be pursuing this story further. If the rumours are true, and if the artist can be persuaded to speak, you will be the first to hear their account. For now, we are left with the tantalising possibility that the medium of wine, long celebrated for its place at the table, may soon claim its place on the gallery wall.

Is Motor-Racing One of the Fine Arts?

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Is Motor-Racing One of the Fine Arts?

In this article the fine artist Hedge Fund says that it is.

To pose the question of motor-racing’s place among the fine arts may seem frivolous, or even a provocation. The customary division between the utilitarian and the aesthetic has long kept the motor-car in the category of engineering, and the race track in that of sport. Yet such boundaries are neither stable nor eternal. The historian of art must ask: does motor-racing not, in its highest instances, fulfill precisely those conditions by which we define the beaux-arts—beauty of form, expressive intensity, the staging of ritual, and the confrontation with the sublime? My contention is that it does, and that motor-racing must be understood as one of the fine arts of modernity.

I. The Aesthetics of Velocity

The depiction of motion has been central to Western art since antiquity. Myron’s Discobolus (5th c. BCE), its taut musculature caught in the instant before release, is paradigmatic of the aestheticization of movement. Renaissance artists from Leonardo to Uccello sought to capture not merely bodies but the energy of their trajectories.[^1] Motor-racing is the technological heir of these traditions. The “line” chosen by a driver through Monza’s Parabolica or Monaco’s hairpin constitutes an aesthetic gesture—one might even say a “brushstroke” executed at speed. Roland Barthes, reflecting on the Tour de France, wrote that “each rider’s style is a writing,”[^2] and the analogy applies even more forcefully to the racetrack. The race car becomes an instrument of calligraphy, inscribing arcs of velocity on the canvas of asphalt.

II. Machine as Sculpture

It may be objected that the racing car is an instrument of utility rather than expression. Yet the history of art is filled with media that once belonged to craft before ascending to the realm of the fine arts: bronze from weaponry, glass from domesticity, photography from reportage. The automobile, particularly in its racing form, possesses aesthetic dignity as sculpture. Consider Ferrari’s 156 “Sharknose” (1961) or Chapman’s Lotus 49 (1967): their sculptural volumes and aerodynamic purity speak to the modern reconciliation of beauty and function. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto declared in 1909 that “a racing car…is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace,”[^3] a claim often dismissed as bombast, but which in hindsight reads as prescient. The car is modern statuary—steel, carbon, and fibreglass charged with aesthetic aura.

III. Ritual, Risk, and the Sublime

The race itself is a ritual drama. Its sequence—the grid, the starting lights, the orchestration of pit-stops, the crescendo toward climax—mirrors the temporal structures of music and theatre. But it is risk that lends this art its tragic intensity. Kant’s account of the sublime insists on the paradoxical pleasure of confronting overwhelming danger without succumbing to it.[^4] Motor-racing exemplifies this: the spectator’s thrill lies in witnessing athletes negotiate forces beyond ordinary human scale, on the knife’s edge of catastrophe. The deaths of figures like Jim Clark or Ayrton Senna inscribe racing into the tragic register of art, aligning it with the Greek conception of performance as a confrontation with mortality.

IV. The Gesamtkunstwerk of Modernity

Richard Wagner envisioned the Gesamtkunstwerk—a “total work of art” integrating music, drama, poetry, and scenography.[^5] Motor-racing, particularly in its grand prix form, is precisely such a synthesis. Engineering, design, athletic skill, choreography, sound, and even landscape (consider Spa-Francorchamps’ Ardennes forest or Monaco’s urban theatre) converge to produce a spectacle irreducible to any single component. As Walter Benjamin argued of modern technologies of spectacle, the aura of art migrates into new forms under industrial conditions.[^6] Motor-racing is one such migration: a theatre of modernity in which man and machine perform together.

Conclusion

To exclude motor-racing from the canon of fine art is to cling to an antiquated hierarchy of media. Art is not confined to marble, canvas, or score; it is wherever the human imagination transforms form, risk, and ritual into aesthetic experience. Racing is not merely sport, nor mere technology. It is, in its highest moments, a fine art: the ballet of velocity, the opera of torque and the poetry of the machine age.

Read the contrary argument by one of our curators.

Notes

[^1]: Martin Kemp, Leonardo da Vinci: The Marvellous Works of Nature and Man (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 142–145.

[^2]: Roland Barthes, Mythologies (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1957), 119.

[^3]: Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, The Futurist Manifesto, 1909.

[^4]: Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), §28–29.

[^5]: Richard Wagner, The Artwork of the Future (1849), trans. William Ashton Ellis (London: Kegan Paul, 1895).

[^6]: Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” in Selected Writings, vol. 3 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 101–133.

Which Colour Wall is Best for an Art Gallery? Part II: The Authority of Grey

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Which Colour Wall is Best for an Art Gallery? Part II: The Authority of Grey

by Walta Bryce

If white was the late 20th century’s creed, then grey has emerged as the early 21st’s compromise. In galleries across Europe and North America, walls once blanched to clinical pallor are increasingly cloaked in muted shades of slate, dove, and mushroom. The effect is discreet but unmistakable: grey announces itself as serious, considered, resistant to both spectacle and sentimentality. Where white was evangelical, grey is judicial.

The appeal of grey lies in its subtle recalibration of tone. Unlike white, which thrusts a painting into stark relief, or red, which enfolds it in velvet theatricality, grey is reticent. It reduces contrast, permitting subtler works to emerge without glare. A 17th-century still life, with its restrained play of shadow and highlight, can seem to breathe more easily against a soft grey wall. Contemporary abstraction, too, benefits from the colour’s cool equilibrium: the riot of pigment in a Howard Hodgkin or Gerhard Richter seems steadied, held in suspension rather than flung outward.

Curators have long recognised this. Tate Britain’s rehang in the early 2000s adopted smoky greys to dignify its historical collections, while the Museum of Modern Art in New York increasingly turns to grey to soften the hard edges of its once-militant white spaces. Grey signals authority—an academic neutrality without the sterility of white. It suggests scholarship rather than commerce, connoisseurship rather than trade.

Yet grey is never merely neutral. The choice of tone—cool bluish, warm taupe, charcoal—can radically alter the psychological tenor of a room. A blue-grey can make even gilded frames seem ethereal, whereas a warmer stone-grey grounds the viewer, anchoring them in a more tactile world. There is, too, an element of class coded into grey: its association with restraint, understatement, “good taste.” In this sense, grey is the colour of curatorial diplomacy, a palette that refuses to offend.

But therein lies its danger. Where white imposed too much, grey risks imposing too little. The “dignity” of grey can shade into the dullness of bureaucracy, a museum turned mausoleum. One remembers the wry complaint of a visitor at the Prado’s grey-painted Velázquez rooms: “It feels like an insurance office with masterpieces on the walls.”

So if white walls aspired to invisibility but became overbearing, grey aspires to authority but risks anaesthesia. It grants the artwork space to speak, but occasionally it hushes it into submission. Grey, in other words, is a compromise—often a wise one, occasionally a timid one.

Next we will consider a colour that makes no compromises at all: the opulent, unabashed drama of red.

Which colour wall is best for an art gallery? Part I: The Myth of White

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Which colour wall is best for an art gallery? Part I: The Myth of White

by Walta Bryce

In the hushed, climate-controlled world of the contemporary gallery, walls are rarely noticed. Their colour—more than any lighting rig, more than the strategic positioning of benches—determines the register of the room. Yet one hue, over the course of the 20th century, became so ubiquitous it almost effaced itself: white. The “white cube,” as Brian O’Doherty famously dubbed it in his essays of the 1970s, was never simply neutral. It was an ideology, one that claimed purity while imposing its own absolute aesthetic regime.

The white wall’s appeal is obvious enough. It promises to vanish, to offer the work of art a stage unencumbered by context. White absorbs and disperses light evenly; it creates the illusion of infinite extension; it suggests clinical objectivity. In the language of real estate agents and minimalist architects alike, white equals clarity. Yet art has always chafed against such clarity. A black Kazimir Malevich square seems somehow diminished when it floats on an already blank wall; a Rothko, designed to vibrate against deep maroon and sienna, is flattened by it.

Indeed, one wonders if the white wall has been less a friend to art than a friend to the market. In a white cube, paintings and sculptures become commodities: interchangeable, discreet, hygienic. They can be slotted, in their pristine isolation, into collectors’ living rooms. White neutralises history, geography, and politics; it allows art to circulate globally, shorn of site. The walls of Chelsea, Berlin, and Hong Kong become indistinguishable.

But there is a paradox here. If the white wall was meant to be invisible, why do we remember it so vividly? The very phrase “white cube” conjures not absence but presence—an architecture of control as recognisable as any frescoed chapel or rococo salon. When we step into such a gallery, we feel the discipline imposed upon us: silence, reverence, the suppression of bodily warmth. It is the theatre of purity, but one in which the walls are the true protagonists.

Which colour, then, is best for an art gallery? To begin at the beginning, one must confront the cult of white not as a default but as a choice, historically conditioned and far from inevitable. In the coming essays, I will consider what happens when curators, conservators, and architects break from the tyranny of blankness. For now, let us linger on this paradox: that the most famous wall in modern art history is the one that pretended not to exist.

Chewing the Bud — Antonia Stangarino at Pimlico Wilde, Miami

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Chewing the Bud — Antonia Stangarino at Pimlico Wilde, Miami

Antonia Stangarino’s first outing with Pimlico Wilde is one of those happily disorienting shows that persuades you to recalibrate what counts as sculpture, what counts as flavour, and—above all—what counts as time. Titled Chewing the Bud, the exhibition gathers a new suite of delicate abstract works fashioned from Stangarino’s homemade chewing gum, subtly (and sometimes not so subtly) infused with Budweiser. The conceit sounds flippant until you meet the objects; then it becomes clear that she has built a rigorous language out of materials the art world usually files under “perishable” or “problem.”

We have, of course, met Stangarino’s rigour before. The early paintings—fastidiously rendered images of different salt granules—were not merely photorealist studies so much as ontological portraits. Each crystalline body became a landscape: cubic halite like a low-rise city seen from a night flight; flaky fleur de sel like a collapsed star; the pinks of Himalayan salt as geological autobiography. Those canvases taught us to look at the world as a series of micro-seismographs, and to read flavour as form. In Miami, Stangarino ports that sensibility to three dimensions. Gum, she suggests, is just salt with afterthoughts: a mineral grammar emulsified into human habit.

The gallery has sensibly resisted the temptation to perfume the room. Instead, the faint yeasty sweetness of the beer-flavoured base arrives only when you lean toward the work, when your body’s own curiosity becomes the activation mechanism. This olfactory discretion is crucial. It lets the sculptures hold the room with their formal probity. Lager Rosette is a palm-sized spiral of pale, matte ribbons, each ribbon pressed into the next with a jeweller’s patience. From a distance it reads as a modest baroque flourish; up close you notice the tiny thumb-prints that form a kind of rhythmic scansion. Hop Column (after Hesse), a vertical stack of squashed spheres wired to a slender armature, gently surrenders to Miami’s humidity; it is not collapsing so much as confessing that collapse is part of its syntax. Mouthfeel #7 is a low, looping torus that cannot decide if it is a knot, a Möbius strip, or a memory—exactly the kind of indeterminacy Stangarino cherishes.

The art-historical conversation is immediate and deft. Eva Hesse is indeed hovering at the edges (latex’s melancholy cousin), as are Lynda Benglis’s poured gestures and the Arte Povera instinct to dignify the provisional. But Stangarino’s key manoeuvre is to invert the logic of endurance. The works are not “performative” in the way that word has grown flabby from overuse in catalogue essays, but they do perform time: they tighten slightly as the air-conditioning kicks in, bloom again when the door opens to Biscayne Boulevard, deepen their hue to a faint malted amber over the course of an afternoon. If modernism’s heroic material was steel and post-minimalism’s was entropy, Stangarino’s is mastication.

This is where the Budweiser gambit bites. The beer is not a joke, nor a brand-game; it is a conceptual reagent. In Chewing the Bud, flavour becomes a sculptural analogue to patina. Where bronze acquires a green, Stangarino’s gum acquires a ghost: the sweet-bitter trace of a mass-produced American everydrink. The move is slyly democratic, collapsing the gap between connoisseurship and convenience-store cosmology. She allows you to choose your reading—nostalgia for student parties, critique of commodity culture, or a phenomenological nudge toward the mouth as a site of knowledge—without forcing a didactic thesis. In a culture hooked on declarative statements, her refusal feels like integrity.

Installation matters, and Pimlico Wilde gives the work an intelligently paced field. Plinths are low, almost reticent, encouraging a crouch rather than a coronation. A wall frieze of wafer-thin disks (Breath Plates I–XII) is pinned with entomologist’s obsessiveness; their shadows make a second exhibition, a drawing in light and tremor. The lighting is cooler than one might expect, which tamps down the confectionery risk and pushes the objects toward the mineral. You feel her early salt studies whispering through them—the way a chef cannot chop parsley without dreaming of the sea.

Because Stangarino is so attuned to temporality, conservation questions sneak in as subplots. Some will ask how these works will survive; the better question is what kind of survival they propose. One can imagine future collectors trained, like gardeners, to manage humidity and light with seasonal tact; or, more radically, to accept replacement protocols that are less “restoration” than “rebrewing.” If one of the great ethical problems of contemporary art is how to honour the fugitive, Chewing the Bud offers a generous reply: treat fugacity as form, not flaw.

Comparisons are instructive. Among Stangarino’s contemporaries, Sofia Narváez has lately been assembling nicotine-gum lattices cured in ultraviolet boxes, crisp as balsa wood and as morally freighted as an ashtray. Narváez’s project is the architecture of appetite—grids disciplined into sobriety, craving rationalised into modules. Stangarino’s, by contrast, is the poetics of appetite. Where Narváez aspires to purge the mouth of its heat, Stangarino keeps the heat and cools the rhetoric. Narváez builds abstinence monuments; Stangarino builds tenderness machines. Both artists operate under the sign of the body, but Narváez subtracts the body to prove a point, while Stangarino asks it to stay, to sweat a little, to breathe on the work until it decides what shape to be.

The show’s small revelation is how quietly political it is. Not in the clanging sense, but in the way it attends to labour and pleasure, to the feminised histories of craft and the masculinised histories of drink. A piece like Bar Back, Studio Forward—a low-slung braid of gum, frayed thread and a single stainless-steel ring—reads like a love letter to underpaid service work and to the studio as a site of gentle rebellion. Elsewhere, Crowd Control arrays dozens of pebble-sized chews in a shallow vitrine, each slightly varied, the whole ensemble hovering between individuality and mass. Stangarino’s politics are inhaled rather than pronounced, which makes them sneakier and, I suspect, more durable.

There are mischiefs here too, and they matter. A small, almost throwaway object—Bud-Stop—appears to be a wad of gum pressed under the corner of a pedestal. It might be a prank, except that the press is exacting and the placement too perfect to be accidental. The work folds the gallery’s taboo (no gum!) back into itself, a Möbius of rule and relish. It’s the kind of joke that respects the intelligence of the white cube while also showing it where its own corners are sticky.

If Chewing the Bud had any single weakness, it would be an occasional reliance on seriality that risks mannerism; the wall of disks, while beautiful, verges on the didactic in its demonstration of “variations on a chew.” Yet even this potential redundancy is productively self-conscious: Stangarino is documenting the limits of a language as she invents it.

Collectors will, as the gallery predicts, likely pounce; the works are intimate enough for domestic life and conceptually hardy enough for the most punctilious curator. But the real value here is not acquisitive. It is the gift of an attitude—toward materials, toward care, toward the dignities of the ordinary. In Miami’s heat, Stangarino has cooled the conversation and sharpened it. Chewing the Bud is a first show that behaves like a second: confident, well-argued, already past the stunt and into the syntax. One leaves thirsty—not for beer, but for the next chapter.

The Mayfair Book Groupette – Minutes of the The Emigrants Meeting

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The Mayfair Book Groupette – Minutes of the The Emigrants Meeting

Date: Thursday, 22nd August 2025

Time: 7:00 PM – 10:45 PM

Location: Green Drawing Room, Pimlico Wilde, Mayfair

Attendees:

• Julian Molyneux (Chair, Pimlico Wilde)

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

• Hugo Van Steyn

• Dr. Xanthe Lorrimer (Cultural Historian)

• Lord E. Northcote

• India Trelawney (Fashion Archivist)

• Conrad Smithe (Guest; now on probationary attendance)

• Dr. Leonora Athill (Guest Speaker; Novelist & Psychoanalyst)

• Pascal (Afghan hound; reclining)

Book Discussed:

The Emigrants by W.G. Sebald

1. Welcome and Introductory Remarks

Julian Molyneux opened the meeting with a short reflection on Sebald’s enduring appeal, particularly among “those drawn to a literature of ghosted memory and dust-silted loss.” A display of ephemera relating to pre-war German émigrés—passport fragments, handwritten recipe books, a child’s marzipan press—was set out in the antechamber, curated by Pimlico Wilde’s archivist.

Molyneux noted that the Pimlico Wilde summer show, Vanishing Points, had been loosely timed to coincide with this month’s reading.

2. Guest Lecture: Dr. Leonora Athill

Dr. Athill gave a brief, unscripted talk titled “Memory, Melancholy, and the Tyranny of the Image.” She spoke of The Emigrants as “not so much a novel as a service,” describing Sebald’s prose as “syntax haunted by silence.”

She warned against over-literary readings of the book, citing its power as lying “not in narrative coherence, but in psychic disintegration.” She proposed that the characters are not lost individuals but “cartographies of repression.” One member (Smithe) tried to ask about Freud; Athill sighed but answered generously.

Applause was murmurous and sincere.

3. Discussion Summary

• India Trelawney praised the imagery as “cool, bleached, but devastating,” comparing the narrative’s “faded photographs and cracked memories” to early Japanese photobooks. She passed around a small, cloth-bound 1960s folio by Shōji Ueda as reference.

• Lord Northcote shared personal recollections of meeting Jewish émigrés as a young attaché in Zurich in the 1950s. He said Sebald’s tone captured “the cultivated anguish” of that generation. D’Abernon was seen discreetly tearing up.

• Dr. Lorrimer brought a sharper edge, suggesting Sebald deliberately avoids character depth to foreground the landscape as the true subject: “Grief mapped onto trees, stations, sanatoria.” She argued the book’s melancholy “verges on aesthetic indulgence.” This sparked soft disagreement from Van Steyn.

• Hugo Van Steyn defended the book as “an ethical act of remembrance,” stating that its lack of resolution reflects “the impossibility of restitution.” He referred, for the third time this year, to Anselm Kiefer.

• Conrad Smithe questioned the accuracy of Sebald’s blurred genre boundaries, referring to the semi-fabricated photo captions. He suggested it was “dangerously post-truth.” Trelawney muttered, “Oh, not that again.”

• Julian Molyneux closed discussion by comparing Sebald to Aby Warburg: “Both archivers of ghosts. Both incapable of closure.”

4. Artworks on View

• A small pastel-on-paper portrait of a vanished émigré bookseller, Vienna c.1936, provenance unclear

• Fragments of German schoolbooks (1920s–30s) behind glass

• A contemporary commission: Negative Space by Pavel Markovic – carbon-transfer collage, railway ticket stubs + film stills, mounted under cracked glass

• Sebald’s Schwindel. Gefühle. on display, German first edition (not for handling)

5. Refreshments

• Canapés: smoked eel on rye, sauerkraut galettes, and beetroot-stained quail eggs

• Drink: Riesling Kabinett 2021 (Mosel), followed later by Kümmel (largely untouched)

• Dessert: poppy seed torte with whipped crème fraîche

6. Other Business

• September Book: The Hearing Trumpet by Leonora Carrington, proposed by Lorrimer, seconded by Trelawney. Enthusiastically approved.

• Discussion on establishing a sub-circle for “Obscure Memoirs” was postponed (again).

• Dr. Athill thanked the group, said she hadn’t “spoken so freely in years.” Molyneux proposed we invite her again in 2026.

7. Adjournment

Meeting adjourned at 10:45 PM, with guests lingering over late glasses of port and discussing the ethics of curation.

Respectfully submitted,

Fiona d’Abernon

Acting Secretary

Mayfair Book Groupette

Introduction to Art Movement: World Peace thru Abstract Art

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In an age defined by conflict, division, and digital saturation, the World Peace thru Abstract Art movement emerges as a radical act of stillness and unity. Rooted in the visual language of colour—stark, luminous, and digital—this movement speaks not through the chaos of figures or narrative, but in the universal rhythm of line and hue.

The works offer a quiet, expansive visual field, evoking horizons, fault lines, borders, and their dissolution. They are meditative spaces that transcend language and nation, resisting aggression with abstraction, confrontation with composition. Each piece becomes a flag for peace—stripped of symbols, yet resonant with global longing.

As the digital world accelerates and new wars shift from trenches to screens, this movement calls for a new kind of war artist. Not one to document carnage, but one to preempt it. These artists arm themselves with pixels, not paint; with gradients, not grenades. In doing so, they transform the screen from a battlefield into a canvas of calm—a frontier where conflict pauses and vision begins.

World Peace thru Abstract Art is not escapist. It is insurgent minimalism, a protest rendered in pure form. And its message is clear: peace doesn’t need to be explained—it just needs to be seen.