Artists

Canvas Vaults: The Fine Art Parkour Movement

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Canvas Vaults: The Fine Art Parkour Movement

A leap across a yawning chasm of negative space.

A roll through a splash of cadmium red.

A vault over the thick impasto ridge of oil paint.

This is the world of Fine Art Parkour, a new performance discipline where the arena isn’t rooftops or railings, but the painted landscapes, cityscapes, and abstractions of fine art itself.

The collective, calling themselves The Fine Art Traceurs, perform inside printed reproductions of artworks, moving as if they inhabit the scene. Their runs might see them bounding along the balustrades of Canaletto’s Venice, springing from the branches of a Rousseau jungle, or tumbling across the fractured planes of a Cubist still life. Where traditional parkour is about navigating real physical architecture, Fine Art Parkour is about navigating the visual architecture of a work of art, its lines, shapes, and implied depths.

The technique draws heavily from art history. The perspective tricks of Renaissance masters become literal running paths; the dynamic diagonals of Baroque painting dictate vaulting routes; the jagged geometry of Mondrian’s grids sets a rhythmic, staccato choreography. By treating a flat image as a navigable space, the performers extend a tradition begun by trompe-l’œil painters and turn two dimensions into three, but through movement not brushwork.

In performance the athletes appear to merge with the artwork. Projected shadows stretch across skies painted centuries ago; lines slice through the horizon, temporarily redrawing the composition. Sometimes they move with the style, fluid and soft in Impressionist haze, and sometimes in defiance of it, adding angularity to pastoral calm.

The result is something between a redrawn painting and a kinetic canvas, a reminder that even the most static masterpiece contains an invitation to move. Fine Art Parkour doesn’t just bring the gallery to life, it lets you step inside it, sprint along its brushstrokes, and leap between its worlds.

Joining Pimlico Wilde – Marco del Vento: The Man Who Packs Himself Away

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Joining Pimlico Wilde – Marco del Vento: The Man Who Packs Himself Away

The Pimlico Wilde gallery has, in its storied history, embraced many artists who challenge the limits of medium, message, and marketability. But this month’s acquisition—the signing of conceptual artist Marco del Vento—may be its most compact yet. Literally. Del Vento’s current magnum opus, Parcelled Selves, consists of the artist mailing himself to institutions worldwide in a series of progressively smaller boxes, until, presumably, either he disappears entirely or the Royal Mail refuses to participate further in the conceptual gag.

At first glance, the premise seems like a droll mash-up of Bas Jan Ader’s doomed voyages and a magician’s escape trick gone intentionally wrong. But del Vento’s self-postage is no stunt for spectacle alone; it is a meditation on “the ever-tightening constraints of the contemporary art market.”

The Shrinking Artist

The inaugural shipment, in April, saw del Vento dispatched from a modest London lockup to a gallery in Antwerp in a tea chest, with air holes and a no food except a travel thermos filled with a strawberry protein drink. By shipment four—Lisbon—he had reduced his container to something resembling a flat-pack ottoman. He insists the sixth and final parcel, due this autumn, will be “no larger than a carry-on bag, and perhaps a little smaller.”

As art historian Rosalind Pennington has noted, “Marco has redefined the term ‘self-contained work of art’ in the most bodily possible sense.” His work forces us to reconsider not only the physical presence of the artist, but also the logistics budget of contemporary galleries.

Past Triumphs and Small Tragedies

Del Vento first emerged from the fertile, faintly damp performance-art scene of late-2000s Bologna, where his early works included Windless Flag—a 14-month live installation in which he stood holding a flag indoors, waiting for a breeze that never came—and Fresco in Reverse, in which he painted an entire ceiling in ultramarine pigment before methodically scraping it all away with a credit card.

His mid-career pièce de résistance, The Last Supper for One, was a durational performance in which he ate a replica of Leonardo’s famous meal, alone, over 13 consecutive days, each day eliminating one dish and one apostle until only a single bread roll remained. Critics debated whether this was a comment on isolation, the commodification of the sacred, or just an excuse to expense a lot of wine.

Obsessions, Real and Imagined

Friends say del Vento has an enduring love for baroque shipping crates, medieval lapdogs, and the faint chemical smell of newly printed catalogues. He has been known to spend hours in archival basements, “listening to the paper.” He speaks of cardboard with the same reverence some artists reserve for Carrara marble, and has been spotted experimenting with different parcel tapes, to find the one with the best “tensile poetics.”

His domestic life is no less idiosyncratic. He owns a collection of 17th-century portrait miniatures of people whose names have been lost to history; he calls them his “imaginary friends” and rearranges them according to mood. His studio contains no traditional easels or canvases—just stacks of brown paper, a postage scale, and a small espresso machine he refers to as “The Patron.”

The Pimlico Wilde Era Begins

For Pimlico Wilde, del Vento represents the logical next step in their ongoing commitment to artists who make collectors scratch their heads. The gallery’s new Director of Conceptuality, Justine Foix, describes him as “an artist who inhabits the space between object and postage surcharge.”

As for del Vento himself, he claims the project will conclude only when he can no longer fit in the box—though given his habit of fasting for conceptual purity, that may take some time. “Art,” he says with a half-smile, “is about reducing oneself until the work is all that’s left. Or until the courier loses you. Whichever comes first.”

One hopes that Pimlico Wilde knows exactly what they’ve signed: an artist who is simultaneously inside and outside the box, and who—if nothing else—has already mastered the art of special delivery.

Dot Hall and the Aesthetics of Speculation

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Dot Hall and the Aesthetics of Speculation

To speak of Dot Hall is to speak of the stock market as mutable surface, something upon which the artist inscribes gestures of capital, erasure, and emergence. Hall’s practice exists in that rarefied territory where finance ceases to be an instrument of accumulation and becomes, instead, a language of form. Her transactions are not mere acts of exchange; they are propositions in an ongoing dialogue between liquidity and intention, a sustained enquiry into the market as both cultural artefact and performative stage.

Hall’s oeuvre resists the neat taxonomies of medium. While her tools appear familiar—brokerage interfaces, algorithmic triggers, risk models—they function in her hands less as financial apparatus than as brushes, pigments, and compositional grids. Each trade is conceived as an aesthetic intervention: an attempt to bend the anonymous momentum of capital into shapes that possess rhythm, asymmetry, or a calculated imbalance. A purchase is not motivated by conventional notions of value, but by its capacity to introduce a certain inflection to the temporal “price line”—a gesture of disruption or elongation, akin to a painter’s sudden scumble across an otherwise orderly field of colour.

In Arbitrage as Diptych (2017), Hall executed simultaneous trades in correlated markets, allowing their slight divergences to form what she called a “financial moiré,” a superposition of patterns visible only in the composite of price data. In Negative Convexity (2020), her positions were structured to profit exclusively in states of extreme volatility, producing a work that existed only when the world around it entered crisis—a reminder that all value systems are contingent, and that beauty may emerge precisely in the fissures of stability.

Critics have often remarked on the paradox of Hall’s success: her projects routinely generate substantial returns, yet their conceptual scaffolding seems to render profit an almost accidental byproduct. In this sense, her practice undermines the conventional binary between art and speculation. As she has remarked in her infamously oblique artist statement: “Profit is simply the pigment that clings to the brush after the stroke is complete.”

Hall’s work invites us to reconsider the stock market not merely as an engine of capital, but as an inexhaustible archive of potential compositions—a shifting, polyphonic text in which the artist’s interventions are both fleeting and indelible. She reminds us that speculation, in its truest etymological sense, is not gambling, but looking: to speculate is to observe, to discern patterns, to imagine what might yet appear on the horizon of the seen.

Into the Blur: The Photographer Pho To and the Ontology of Obscurity

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The latest release by Vietnamese photographer Pho To, unveiled yesterday by Pimlico Wilde, continues his audacious interrogation of the photographic act itself. The image— Untitled —appears at first glance to be almost nothing: a murky field of darkness, bisected by a faintly illuminated form that resists definition. A blurred gesture? A shadow caught mid-breath? A momentary refusal of legibility? In Pho To’s hands, the indistinct becomes revelatory.

The composition—if one may still use that word—feels accidental in the most deliberate sense. Pho To has long been known for his devotion to aleatory practice: setting his camera to random configurations, inviting chance as co-author. Yet here, the uncertainty reaches a new register. The soft, brownish gradient at the image’s left edge seems to emanate from the void, suggesting both emergence and withdrawal. The darkness beyond it—impenetrable, total—acts not as background but as philosophical proposition.

One might recall Roland Barthes’s dictum that photography is the “that-has-been,” the visible trace of what once stood before the lens. Pho To’s image seems to rebel against this very ontology. It is an image that refuses to declare what has been; it withholds testimony. In doing so, it proposes a radical alternative to representation: a non-image that exists not to show, but to remind us that most of what exists cannot be shown at all.

There is a whisper of motion in the blur—perhaps a hand, perhaps merely light misinterpreting itself. The effect is profoundly tactile. Viewers report the strange sensation of proximity, as if touching the surface of an idea rather than perceiving it. This phenomenological tension—the oscillation between intimacy and obscurity—is where Pho To’s genius resides. His photographs do not seek to clarify; they estrange, destabilize, and in their refusal, disclose the very limits of sight.

Pimlico Wilde, who has championed Pho To’s work since his early London exhibitions, describes this new piece as “an act of radical humility.” And indeed, it is humility of a rarefied sort: an image that steps back, allowing the ineffable to occupy the foreground. The photograph is not so much about anything as it is a meditation on the conditions of aboutness itself.

In a cultural moment saturated by images that insist on being understood—sharpened, filtered, algorithmically bright—Pho To offers us the gift of opacity. This latest work, hovering between form and void, reminds us that the world’s most meaningful presences may arrive shrouded, trembling, and barely visible.

To look at it is to confront the sublime in its quietest expression: the trembling threshold where light ceases to explain—and begins, instead, to think.

London Café by Pho To

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Newly available.

In this photograph, Pho captures the tension between interior intimacy and the relentless flow of the city beyond the glass. The café, with its muted palette of blonde wood and softened shadows, becomes an anonymous stage upon which figures sit in partial silhouette. Suggesting both companionship and isolation, their presence is blurred just enough to deny individuality and instead evoke archetypes of urban transience. Against this tableau, the woman in the foreground—poised, momentarily caught mid-turn—anchors the composition with a cinematic sense of inevitability, as though she is both participant and observer in a fleeting narrative.

What elevates the image is its dialogue with time: the distortion of the lens bends reality, compressing the hurried geometry of street life into an almost painterly swirl. The exterior bleeds into the interior, the outside world pressing in through windows that no longer serve as mere barriers but as thresholds between states of being. The private and the public collapse into one another in what is not a simple café scene, but rather a meditation on the porousness of modern existence, where every reflective surface reminds us that we are always both watching and being watched.

Echoes in Gel: The Jellied Visions of Henri Velasquez

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Echoes in Gel: The Jellied Visions of Henri Velasquez

By Dr. Soraya Min, Department of Postmaterial Studies, Worcester University for the Handbook of Lesser-Known Artists

Few contemporary artists have so perplexed critics—and delighted bioengineers—as Henri Velasquez (b. 1979, Montevideo, Uruguay). Operating at the intersection of sensory art, and post-anthropocentric aesthetics, Velasquez is best known for pioneering the genre of gelatin-based spatial installation, or what he coined “hydrocolloid sculpture.”

His primary medium? Unflavored, food-grade gelatin—used not as a vehicle for nostalgia or irony, but as a serious, if wobbly, inquiry into memory, decay, and perception.

In a contemporary art world saturated with archival anxiety and digital preservation, Velasquez has built a body of work around impermanence.

Origins: The Viscous Turn

Velasquez began as a classically trained sculptor at the Universidad de la República in Uruguay but quickly grew disenchanted with the fetishization of permanence. After a formative period working in a biochemistry lab (as a janitor, not a technician), he became obsessed with physical states between liquid and solid. He would later describe gelatin as “the metaphysical compromise between ambition and collapse.”

His earliest gelatin works were unsanctioned: slabs of red gelatin cast inside urinals, in subway turnstiles, and—infamously—on the keyboard of a harpsichord thought to have been played by Mozart in Vienna.

These early acts, both anarchic and tender, became known as Los Blandos (“The Softs”), and positioned him as a fringe trickster in Latin American conceptual circles.

Medium: Gelatin as Metaphor and Material

To Velasquez, gelatin is not just a visual medium—it is tactile, sonic, and profoundly temporal. “It sweats. It sighs. It forgets itself,” he wrote in his notes for the GEL™ Symposium (Lisbon, 2012). He is known to cast large-scale works—entire rooms, staircases, chandeliers—out of molded gelatin that visibly degrades throughout the course of an exhibition.

The gelatin is always unflavored, untinted. “Color distracts. Flavors beg. I need my material to behave like fog: present but without demands.”

Temperature is an essential element in his installations. Many are displayed in carefully climate-controlled spaces, while others are deliberately left to melt. Some include audience interaction: visitors must walk barefoot through gelatin fields, sit in soft chairs that deform beneath them, or whisper into congealed microphones that no longer transmit sound.

Notable Works and Exhibitions

• “Memory Is a Tremble” (2014, Reina Sofía, Madrid):

A 9-meter table covered in hundreds of gelatin castings of family heirlooms—tools, dolls, medals—that gradually collapsed over a 3-week period under soft UV lighting.

• “Orthogonal Collapse” (2017, Venice Biennale):

An entire room constructed of gelatin-based bricks, stacked meticulously into classical architectural motifs. On opening day, the ambient heat began to soften the walls, and by the end of the exhibition, the room had partially fallen in on itself.

• “Index of Softness” (2020, MoMA PS1, New York):

Visitors were invited to press their forearms into a wall of warm gelatin and leave imprints that faded over hours. The artist referred to this as a “tactile census of impermanence.”

The Gelation Schism

Velasquez’s practice has not been without its critics—or fractures. In 2019, he was publicly accused by a former assistant, conceptual chef Nadya Lemcke, of “monopolizing the metaphors of softness.” Their collaborative project Edible Echoes (which involved visitors eating gelatin castings of musical instruments) was later disavowed by both parties.

Since then, Velasquez has been more reclusive, but not less ambitious. In 2023, he was reportedly working with a group of structural engineers to build a gelatin tower 100 metres high in the Andes, designed to last exactly one month.

Critical Reception and Legacy

To some, Velasquez is a charlatan—a jester in an apron, stirring nonsense in a bowl. But to others, he is one of the most radically embodied thinkers in contemporary art. His work speaks to ecological fragility, cultural amnesia, and the failure of language in the face of entropy.

His writings, collected in the volume Notes Toward a Theory of Wobble (2021), have been widely cited by theorists of new materialism and posthuman phenomenology.

Art historian Camila Dror described his practice best:

“Velasquez is the only artist I know who takes impermanence seriously, but not solemnly. He invites us to laugh at our own desire to last.”

Final Thoughts: On the Verge of Collapse

As of writing, Henri Velasquez continues to work in a refrigerated studio outside Montevideo. He refuses to preserve any of his sculptures beyond their exhibition dates. “To refrigerate is to deny time,” he told a Spanish interviewer. “Let the jelly die.”

His rumored next project? A symphony for gelatin titled Concerto for Collapse—a performance piece where deep bass frequencies slowly liquefy an orchestra of moulded instruments.

“If marble is how a culture boasts,” Velasquez once said, “gelatin is how it confesses.”

The Whisper Carver: The Sonic Absences of Henri Pagnol

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The Whisper Carver: The Sonic Absences of Henri Pagnol

From the upcoming Handbook of Lesser-known Artists

In an age where sound art is often reduced to ambient noise or immersive spectacle, Henri Pagnol (b. 1955, Marseille) has pursued a path so peculiar that even seasoned curators admit they have difficulty explaining it to audiences without provoking laughter.

Pagnol’s chosen medium is whisper erosion—the slow physical wear of objects caused by the repeated act of talking or whispering onto their surfaces. His practice, which spans five decades, is not merely about sound, but about its erosive touch.

Over the years, he has “carved” marble blocks, dulled polished copper, and even altered antique mirrors—not with tools, but with years of murmured breath.

Origins: Silence as a Chisel

The story of Pagnol’s medium begins in 1978 when, as a bored apprentice in a restoration workshop, he leaned close to an ancient limestone frieze and daily recited Rimbaud into it. Months later, he claimed to notice a subtle pitting on the stone surface, which he attributed not to dust or age, but to the soft abrasion of moisture-laden breath.

Convinced he had stumbled onto a form of “sonic sculpture,” Pagnol began methodically whispering into stones, metals, and glass. The work was excruciatingly slow—sometimes requiring years before any visible change occurred.

“I am not carving an object,” he told an early interviewer, “I am persuading it to change.”

Method: The Breath as Tool

Pagnol’s studio looks less like an atelier than a confessional. Objects rest on pedestals at mouth height. A small metronome marks his whispering pace. The artist wears no mask; moisture is essential. His whispered texts are often poems, political manifestos, or strings of nonsense syllables, chosen for the shape they give the lips and the warmth of exhalation.

He considers each project a duet: the object’s molecular resistance versus the persistence of his murmurs. For a large marble piece, he might spend eight hours a day over a decade, slowly coaxing its surface into a new topography.

Notable Works and Exhibitions

• “Le Faible Marteau” (The Weak Hammer), 1989, Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris:

A copper plate displayed alongside an audio recording of ten years’ worth of whispered texts that had gradually dulled its mirror finish into a soft matte haze. Visitors could lean close to see faint lip-shaped depressions.

• “La Chambre des Sibilances” (Room of Sibilance), 2003, Venice Biennale:

A darkened chamber containing twenty antique mirrors, each partially clouded by years of whispered recitations of extinct bird names. Attendees reported a “palpable quiet pressure” in the room.

• “Erosion No. 47” (2016, Kyoto Art Center):

A limestone sphere, once perfectly smooth, subtly hollowed on one side after twenty-three years of daily whispering the alphabet in French.

Falling Out: The Whisper Schism

In the mid-2000s, Pagnol became associated with a younger group of “sonic sculptors” who experimented with directed breath and vocal resonance to shape malleable materials. The collaboration, however, collapsed in 2008 after a public dispute in Berlin over whether recorded whispers—played through hidden speakers—could be considered equivalent to live human breath.

Pagnol declared recordings “dead breath” and left the group. “An object will only yield to breath that has crossed the beating heart,” he wrote.

The Living Artifact

Pagnol refuses to sell his works, arguing that their “erosion is unfinished” until he dies. Many institutions host his pieces on indefinite loan, with the condition that the artist must have access to continue whispering into them. The Louvre reportedly employs a dedicated staffer to unlock a gallery after hours for his murmured maintenance sessions.

His works are not fixed; they are mid-transformation, as if perpetually listening. This presents museums with a curatorial paradox: the objects degrade over time, yet their value lies in that degradation.

Critical Reception and Legacy

Some critics dismiss Pagnol as a performance artist indulging in pseudo-science; others regard him as one of the purest material poets of his generation. The late curator Sophie Daumas famously said, “Pagnol doesn’t sculpt objects—he sculpts patience.”

Younger conceptualists exploring “slow art” and “imperceptible change” often cite him as a pioneer. Philosophers of material culture have drawn parallels between his work and glacial erosion, coral growth, and even political change through persistent dissent.

Final Thoughts: The Whisper as Monument

Now in his seventies, Pagnol continues to work in a small, humid studio in Marseille. He is rumored to be undertaking his most ambitious project yet: whispering into a block of Carrara marble for the remainder of his life, intending it to be displayed only posthumously.

In a rare 2024 interview, when asked if he feared the work might never be “finished,” he smiled and replied:

“The whisper is never finished. The marble is only pretending to resist.”

From Ink to Insect: The Art of Silvio Neris and the Termite Manuscripts

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From Ink to Insect: The Art of Silvio Neris and the Termite Manuscripts

By Dr. Anika Scholz, Professor of Art Theory for the Handbook of Lesser Known Artists

In an age saturated by digital replication and hyper-visible authorship, Silvio Neris (b. 1961, Ferrara, Italy) offers a profoundly unsettling counterpoint: artworks that eat themselves.

Best known for his decades-long project, Codex Termitaria, Neris created works in a medium so strange it was initially dismissed as grotesque gimmickry: termite-generated manuscript destruction. In other words, he invited colonies of termites to “edit,” sculpt, and gradually consume handwritten texts of his own composition—treating insects not merely as metaphors, but as collaborators.

The result? A body of work that exists in perpetual erasure—art as a pact between creation and disappearance, authored by both man and insect.

Origins: The Lexicon of Devouring

Silvio Neris trained first as a calligrapher in Bologna before earning a degree in comparative theology. He was obsessed from a young age with medieval manuscripts, particularly palimpsests—texts overwritten, scraped away, fragmented. “The absence of language was more potent than the words themselves,” he wrote in his early notebook Lacrima Scripturae (1982).

But it wasn’t until a fateful trip to Surinam in 1991 that Neris encountered the Nasutitermes genus of termites—wood- and paper-consuming insects that would become the medium of his life’s work.

Rather than preserving ancient documents, Neris began to create manuscripts for destruction—dense, ornate calligraphic texts inked with a homemade blend of linseed oil and honey, designed specifically to lure termites.

The Termite Manuscripts: Method and Meaning

Neris’s process was both scientific and ritualistic. First, he composed philosophical, spiritual, or artistic treatises in meticulous calligraphy—never typing, never scanning. He would then encase the manuscripts in glass-walled termite enclosures, sometimes for weeks, sometimes for years. Over time, the insects would carve tunnels through the pages, eroding text, reconfiguring syntax, and leaving behind abstract voids, natural glyphs, or complete annihilation.

These works were not preserved as static objects. Rather, Neris documented them only occasionally with high-resolution scans—once before exposure to the termites, once after, and often, not at all. “What matters is the gesture of surrender,” he insisted in a rare interview. “The artist must relinquish final authorship.”

Select pieces, like Fragmentum XIII (on the death of snow), feature pages half-eaten, with fragments of Latin drifting through the ruined paragraphs. Others, like Codex Nullus, exist now only as a title—completely consumed.

Exhibitions: Devouring the Viewer

His 2004 solo show at the Fondazione Prada, Mandibles of Life, was a turning point. The centerpiece, a 32-page theological tract on silence, was presented mid-consumption. Viewers witnessed the insects slowly erasing the text over the course of the exhibition.

Some critics were repulsed; others awed. Philosopher Claire Badiou attended and later wrote: “Neris creates a theology of absence through the appetite of lesser beings. It is the most honest eschatology I have seen.”

The artist’s refusal to frame the termite as “metaphor” infuriated many. “They are not symbols,” he insisted. “They are editors.”

Subsequent exhibitions in Berlin, Kyoto, and São Paulo emphasized performative decay. The installations featured ambient microphones picking up the faint crackle of termite mandibles, giving voice to the act of artistic destruction.

Collapse and Withdrawal

In 2015, Neris staged what was billed as his final work: Index Moriturae, a library of 108 handwritten books, locked in wooden cabinets seeded with termites. Each cabinet was sealed, never to be opened. The titles were announced publicly, but the contents were to remain unseen until fully devoured.

This act—part disappearance, part protest—was in response to what he called “the ruinous hunger of the market for permanence.”

Afterward, he withdrew from public life. Rumours persist that he continues his work in a monastery outside Mantua, feeding insects with inked meditations on impermanence.

Critical Legacy: Anti-Archival Aesthetics

Silvio Neris’s practice—situated at the cross-section of environmental art, performance, manuscript culture, and speculative theology—resists easy categorization. Is it destruction or collaboration? Sculpture or language? Is the termite a tool or a co-creator?

What’s clear is that Neris expanded the role of the artist into domains of inter-species authorship, consumptive aesthetics, and radical anti-preservation. In an era obsessed with metadata, permanence, and visibility, he dared to make work that refused all three.

His influence is beginning to show. Recent “bio-degenerative” artists, like Lena Xu and the Spore Collective, have cited Neris as a key inspiration. So too have post-human theorists and ecocritical philosophers. His few interviews are now taught in MFA courses as primary texts on aesthetic self-erasure.

It is only right to give Neris the last word. He made a fitting comment in 1998. “The greatest beauty,” he said, “is what you made knowing it would not last.”

Travel: The Fine Art Smirk that Launched Several Trains

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Travel: The Fine Art Smirk that Launched Several Trains

Tracking the Elusive Cool Across Europe

By Jessop Dinton of Art & Elsewhere Magazine

There are people who chase wildflowers in Provence, others who follow the aurora borealis across Finland. And then there’s me: riding trains and local buses, dodging security guards, and mispronouncing things in five languages just to catch a glimpse of a single recurring face.

The artist whose work I’m seeking out around Europe is known only as 2Cool — graffiti phenomenon, balaclava loyalist, and master of the one-image oeuvre. His grinning, sunglassed blob – can I call it a blob? – has appeared across walls, rooftops, drainage pipes, and water towers from Lagos to Kyoto. He hardly changes the image, occasionally the details: a blue face here, spiky green hair there, a single tear under one lens if you’re lucky.

And now, he’s gallery-certified — repped by the ultra-avant-garde Pimlico Wilde in London, where a framed bit of brickwork featuring “The Cool Face” (as the public insists on calling it, though he refuses to confirm the name) recently sold for a price that could fund the Polish rail network for a month.

But what’s the point of seeing a rebellious grin behind glass? So, I set off across Europe to see 2Cool where he lives best: outside. Join me on the journey…

Berlin, Germany

Location: Friedrichshain, behind a Vietnamese noodle shop

Condition: Faded, tagged over, still majestic

Berlin is where cool comes to die and then gets reborn on a skateboard. The first Cool I encounter is layered under three years of anarchist slogans and something that might be a tribute to Björk. But there he is — smiling through it all. The wall’s practically sighing with history. A passerby with a mullet and a tote bag squints at it and murmurs, “OG,” then skateboards away. A great start.

Vienna, Austria

Location: An underpass near the Danube

Condition: Pristine. Possibly protected by the local nuns I saw walking by.

Vienna is all Mozart and marzipan until you duck under the wrong bridge. Here, in clean lines and soft blue hues, the Cool Face floats like a secular icon. A local teenager informs me in perfect English: “This one is called The Vienna Variant. It’s known for the side-part.” Apparently there’s a whole taxonomy online. I’m starting to suspect 2Cool has fan fiction*.

Naples, Italy

Location: A wall outside a community football pitch

Condition: Painted over twice, then restored by local kids

Naples is a city that respects its icons, whether saints or blobs. This particular Face sports Napoli jersey make-up, and of course a slight smirk of defiance, as if ready to throw flares at the Champions League final in remote East Europe. I ask a street vendor if he knows 2Cool. He shrugs and says, “He is like Maradona — everywhere, but no one sees him arrive.”

Barcelona, Spain

Location: Rooftop of a student housing block

Condition: Immense. Probably visible from space. Almost certainly illegal.

Barcelona’s contribution to the Cool Canon is dramatic: a 20-foot-tall mural painted across the top of a building, visible only if you’re on a drone or have poor instincts for trespassing (I have both). This one has mirrored shades and a moustache. A reference to Dalí? Or just a joke? Either way, it’s ridiculous. And brilliant.

Brussels, Belgium

Location: The side of a government building, behind a dumpster

Condition: Nearly scrubbed out, ghost-like

Only a faint outline remains, like an ancient cave drawing. The Cool Face barely registers — just the suggestion of a grin, the echo of a smirk. A Belgian curator I meet over moules-frites insists this version is “a commentary on the impermanence of the state.” I think it’s just been rained on for six years.

Paris, France

Location: A stairwell in the Montmartre Métro

Condition: Illegal, but clearly adored

Paris delivers the most romantic iteration: a tiny, tender rendering of the Face tucked behind an old station map. A small tag next to it reads, “il revient toujours” — which might mean he always comes back. (Maybe a French speaker can tell me). A woman in a trench coat stops beside me, smiles, and whispers, “He was here in 2021. I saw him. He walked like someone who doesn’t care who’s watching.” Then she disappears, in a cloud of smoke. (Because she lit a Gauloise, not because she practises magic.)

London, UK

Location: Behind the quondam Pimlico Wilde gallery in Camden.

Condition: Sharp, fairly recent, and just out of reach

The final stop. I circle the white-cube fortress that used to sell 2Cool’s work for six figures before the lease ran out. And behind it — spray-painted in matte gold on a blackened service door — is the Face. Different again. Regal. Resigned. Still smiling.

The building is now a shop for vegan dog-biscuits and first-press massage oil for horses. I ask the assistant behind the till if they know there is an original 2cool worth hundreds of thousands nearby. They nod once and say, “We let it stay. He didn’t ask. But he never does.”

Final Thoughts

After 12 cities, 43 trains, two questionable hostels, and one escalator injury, I still haven’t met 2Cool. I didn’t expect to, but it would have been nice. I get he wants to remain anonymous, but I wouldn’t tell anyone. He’s like a rumour with a spray can — always ahead of you, always smiling back. And now, whenever I see a blank wall, I catch myself scanning for the shape. A blob. A smirk. Maybe a new hairdo. Maybe not.

Because the world’s complicated. But the Face is simple. And sometimes, that’s enough.

Jessop Dinton is a writer and amateur cartographer and wishes that you could still stick your head out of train windows.

*He does!

One Star Reviews: An Assault on Eyes, Ears, and Dignity: Mucosal Rapture at The Lamp Gallery

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One Star Reviews: An Assault on Eyes, Ears, and Dignity: Mucosal Rapture at The Lamp Gallery

Review of Mucosal Rapture: A Multimedia Excavation of Internal Landscapes

Let me begin by saying I have experienced a lot of art in my time: the sublime, the confounding, the moving, and the outright fraudulent. Rarely, though, does a show actively fight back. Torbin von Eel’s latest atrocity, Mucosal Rapture, doesn’t just blur the line between art and nonsense—it punches you on the nose whilst whispering “you’re complicit.”

This “immersive, bio-reactive experience” opens with an interactive piece called “Intestinal Cathedral,” in which guests are invited to crawl through a low tunnel lined with latex, raw cauliflower, and warm, wet towels while ambient throat-clearing plays at full volume. If that sounds disgusting—it is. But according to the provided pamphlet (a ten-page stapled manifesto printed in Comic Sans), it represents “the return to pre-digestive space, where shame is born and purged simultaneously.” Really? What it actually feels like is contracting a mould allergy in a tiny car wash run by lunatics.

Emerging from the tunnel you arrive in a room where you’re greeted by the words The Sacrum of Language painted in large letters on the wall. Suspended above you is a rotating door covered in used toothbrushes and Post-it notes bearing phrases like “My mouth is a graveyard of consent” and “Text me back ASAP.” Next to this is a flickering television playing a low-fi video of the artist shaving a kiwi fruit while sobbing.

The walls are smeared—intentionally, one hopes—with what von Eel refers to as “emotionally-charged pigment applications.” These are, in layman’s terms, paints applied to the wall without brushes. Tor claims this palette “rebels against Western retinal imperialism.” I am not convinced.

In the centre of the gallery is the show’s signature piece: “Mother, I Have Become Moisture,” a glass chamber filled with humidifiers and two mannequins in leather harnesses slowly inflating and deflating like neglected pool toys. Every fifteen minutes, a foghorn blasts while a recording of von Eel murmuring “I forgive you, or do I” plays from inside a tapestried lung suspended one metre from the floor. Two people around me burst out laughing, at which point a gallery assistant scolded them and had them removed – von Eel is clear that laughter is not a suitable response to his work.

One room of the show is dedicated to the artist’s “live performance pod,” where von Eel himself appears hourly to crawl on all fours in a flesh-coloured morphsuit while eating kale off the floor and muttering “I am me, I am need.”

I asked a gallery assistant what medium the artist trained in. She scoffed and replied, “He rejects the tyranny of medium.”

To call Mucosal Rapture pretentious would be an insult to every wine drinker who’s ever said the word “terroir.” It’s not that the emperor has no clothes—he doesn’t even have a body.

I left with a headache, a mild rash and a lingering sense that I’d just witnessed an extremely elaborate dare.

One star—generously awarded because I did briefly enjoy the absurdity of watching three art students take notes about a work composed of damp gauze as if it contained secrets from the universe.

Avoid this show unless you’ve recently lost a bet or wish to fully surrender your faith in the contemporary art world