Artists

The Absolute Disclosure of Liora Vey: Art as Relentless Truth-Telling

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The Absolute Disclosure of Liora Vey: Art as Relentless Truth-Telling

In a time when much of contemporary art appears veiled in irony, coded aesthetics, or self-protective distance, the practice of Liora Vey (b. 1984, Antwerp) cuts through with a disarming,and often deeply unsettling,directness. Vey’s work is not visual in any traditional sense; it is the act of saying everything she thinks, unfiltered, no matter the situation. The medium is language, but the form is closer to performance, to intervention, to lived experiment. What emerges is both a singular body of work and a mirror that reflects the instability, absurdity, and madness latent in us all.

The Practice of Disclosure

Vey’s “performances” occur without announcement. At an exhibition opening, she might murmur aloud: “Everyone here is pretending to understand this painting, but they are mostly waiting for the wine.” At a hospital bedside, she has been documented saying: “You are afraid you are dying, but what frightens me is that I will one day sit here too.” In the middle of a residency interview panel, she once announced: “I want the grant, but I also want you to know that I resent needing your approval.”

Every setting becomes a stage; every thought becomes uttered material. Unlike scripted performance, these disclosures are improvised and inescapably real. Vey’s art is not about building a world, but about tearing down the buffers we usually maintain between thought and speech. The audience, if we can even call them that, is implicated,sometimes complicit, sometimes horrified, often laughing nervously.

Historical Echoes

Vey’s practice can be traced through a lineage of radical honesty in art. One hears faint echoes of Diogenes the Cynic, who defied convention by doing in public what others would conceal. In the 20th century, Vey’s brutal transparency recalls the confessional literature of Sylvia Plath or the raw psychoanalytic performances of Marina Abramović, yet Vey goes further: there is no frame, no “time for art” versus “time for life.” The piece is ongoing, indistinguishable from living.

If the Situationists sought to collapse the boundary between art and everyday life, Vey collapses the boundary between thought and speech. If Fluxus artists embraced chance operations, she embraces the uncontrollable slipstream of cognition itself.

The Madness in Us All

To listen to Vey is to encounter not just her mind, but the mechanism of thought we all share,desires, pettiness, cruelty, love, shame. She exposes the psychic “noise” we suppress in order to remain social beings. In doing so, she reminds us that sanity itself is performative, a consensus held together by restraint.

Critics have accused her of cruelty, of violating the private sphere. Yet Vey insists: “I am not cruel. I am only transparent. The cruelty is already there, inside us.” The discomfort is not generated by her words, but by their resonance with our own hidden interior monologues.

A Radical Continuation

Liora Vey’s project is one of uncompromising fidelity to thought itself. In an era of branding, self-editing, and algorithmic curation, her refusal to filter may be the most radical gesture available. Like the Dadaists mocking reason, or Bas Jan Ader embracing the tragic vulnerability of falling, Vey embodies the unpresentable truth of human contradiction.

Her art is not a call for everyone to “speak their mind,” but a revelation of what it means if we did: a world where love confesses jealousy, where admiration reveals contempt, where mourning admits relief. It is a reminder that beneath our carefully wrought performances of self, there is a cacophony waiting to break through.

Mayfair Artists: The Hidden Studios Behind Georgian Façades

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Mayfair Artists: The Hidden Studios Behind Georgian Façades

Mayfair has always lived a double life. Behind immaculate terraces and discreet doormen, creative experiment has found a foothold. In the 18th century, George Frideric Handel composed oratorios from a townhouse on Brook Street; two centuries later, Jimi Hendrix made a home just next door, filling it with guitars and Portobello Road trinkets. Illustration flourished in South Audley Street, where Hal Hurst sketched for Punch, and impressionist painter Roy Petley captured bucolic calm for Mayfair collectors.

That tradition continues, though you may not notice it from the pavement. For all the boutiques and members’ clubs, Mayfair remains an artists’ quarter of sorts, its studios hidden above shopfronts or tucked into mews. Five of its contemporary residents, different in temperament and method, embody the neighbourhood’s present spirit.

Serena Vellacott

From a drawing room studio above Mount Street, Serena Vellacott paints Mayfair itself,or rather, its reflections. Her series Windows captures the distortions of shop glass and passersby, layered into near-abstraction. The canvases lean, enormous, against gilt panelling.

“I’m not interested in people so much as the way glass reshapes them,” she says, adjusting tulips on a table. “It’s a reminder that the city is always bending us into new forms.”

She arrives by mint-green Vespa, charcoal smudges visible on the handlebars. A recent work began when she glimpsed an umbrella reflected in Bond Street glass. “I went home and painted over a finished canvas that same evening.”

Felix Moreau

In a mews garage, sculptor Felix Moreau works almost exclusively with bicycles,bronze frames and wheels, often cast at heroic scale.

“I grew up in Paris, where the bike is freedom. Bronze makes it permanent,” he explains, rolling a heavy wheel into place.

He cycles everywhere, usually on a bike not made from bronze. He is remembered locally for once blocking Davies Street when a ten-metre bronze bike sculpture was misdelivered. “Londoners were furious, then everyone wanted a selfie with the work. It was my most public exhibition to date.”

Amira D’Souza

Amira makes light tangible. Her installations of fibre optics and salvaged glass transform rooms into shifting tunnels of colour.

Her studio, a Mayfair basement she calls “the bunker,” is crowded with wires and chai mugs. A small black Smart car is her workshop on wheels.

“Light is political,” she says. “We think it’s neutral, but who gets to stand in the spotlight? Who stays in shadow? That’s what I work with.”

One late-night test lit her entire street from 1:30 to 5:00. “I apologised,” she laughs, “but neighbours now ask me when the next ‘light show’ is scheduled.”

Thomas Leland

Where others look outward, Thomas Leland turns to Mayfair’s quieter figures,doormen, waiters, shopkeepers,rendered in warm oils.

“If Mayfair has a soul, it’s in those faces,” he says, seated in his flat above a pub, canvases stacked like barricades.

He drives a dented Mini, though locals more often see him sketching at café tables. The Cat and Hat landlord recalls Leland once leaving a palette on the bar, a customer then mistaking it for a cheese board. “They teased her for weeks,” he admits, “but she liked how the oils caught the light against the pint glasses.”

Lila Cheng

On a rooftop near Grosvenor Square, Lila Cheng tends fragile paper forests. Her sculptures, folded and scorched, explore impermanence and renewal.

“Paper holds memory,” she says softly, smoothing a crease. “When you burn it, the memory doesn’t vanish,it just changes state.”

Her greenhouse studio is alive with origami and plants. She travels by electric bicycle, decorated with paper flowers. During a storm, one of her paper trees blew three streets away and was returned by a neighbour. “It survived intact. I kept it as a reminder: fragility doesn’t mean weakness.”

A Subtle Continuity

What unites these artists is not style but setting. Mayfair, with its combination of seclusion and spectacle, lends itself to discretion. Its residents may speak in bronze, oils, paper or light, but all continue a tradition that includes Handel’s harpsichord and Hendrix’s guitars.

Here, creativity persists not in spectacle but in private acts of making, carried out quietly behind Georgian façades. Mayfair’s art, like its artists, is easy to miss. Perhaps that is part of its allure.

Wings of Meaning: The Aeroplanic Interventions of Marja Klein

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In a remote hangar on the outskirts of Toulouse, a Lufthansa Airbus A320 glows iridescent under the lights. Not from its metallic fuselage, but from a dizzying cascade of brushstrokes on its body. This is not a corporate stunt or a conceptual prank,it’s the latest work of Marja Klein, the reclusive Dutch-German painter who has become the most controversial figure in contemporary art by doing what no painter before her has done: use aircraft,actual, operational aircraft,as her canvas. For Klein, the plane is not a vehicle but a surface.

Her practice began unassumingly enough: graduate work in neo-expressionist abstraction at the Städelschule, a few residencies in Iceland and Patagonia, and a brief stint observing some aeronautical engineers. But it was her 2019 manifesto, “The Extended Canvas: Toward a Transatmospheric Aesthetics,” that revealed her ambition. In it, she argued that traditional painting had reached a saturation point, both spatially and semantically. “If canvas is a skin,” she wrote, “why not paint the organs of global movement? Why not paint the very arteries through which tourism and commerce flow?”

The first iteration of this idea,Fuselage No. 1 (For Barnett Newman),landed, quite literally, at Charles de Gaulle in early 2021. A retired cargo jet, reactivated temporarily for the work, bore a single red zip line down its side, splitting a field of hand-painted electric blue. It drew criticism from both art world purists and aviation traditionalists. “It’s neither safe nor comprehensible,” said one Parisian curator/pilot, who didn’t want to be named. “It’s somewhere between performance and vandalism.”

Undeterred, Klein’s work escalated. In collaboration with several independent air fleets and a little-known Estonian aerospace coating company, she began producing what she calls aero-paintings: labour-intensive, site-specific works executed directly onto the planes, which are then returned to flight. Each one requires months of bureaucratic negotiation, FAA consultations, and custom pigment development to withstand the UV exposure and atmospheric pressure changes. And yet, to Klein, all this is part of the piece.

These aircraft,glimpsed only briefly by passengers on the tarmac or through terminal windows,become ephemeral galleries of motion. “I’m not interested in permanence,” she said in a rare interview. “I’m interested in distribution. In becoming part of someone’s memory of a journey.”

Her 2024 project “Flightpath Diptych” involved two Boeing 737s: one painted in a palette of pale greens and muted greys based on 1950s Soviet military maps; the other inscribed with layers of coded writing drawn from declassified Cold War-era weather reports. The planes crossed paths over the Arctic Circle during the summer solstice, their coordinated flight paths generating a skyborne choreography visible only to satellite tracking systems and a small group of Klein’s paid subscribers who were given access to the live telemetry data.

Art historians struggle to categorize her work. Is it painting, performance, installation? Environmental art? Some invoke Robert Smithson’s Non-Sites or Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels; others trace her lineage to Gutai, to Yves Klein, to Panamarenko or Hipplo. But Klein herself resists the comparisons.

In so doing, she has raised thorny questions about authorship, temporality, and visibility. Philistine aviation crews mean that her planes are often cleaned or repainted without notice. A work might last six months or six days. Sometimes, she leaves only a signature in a hard-to-spot area- these stay airborne longer according to plane spotters/collectors around the world who have welcomed her work, tracking her oeuvre with vigilance, flight logs, and their familiarity with global aviation routes.

Yet for those who catch a glimpse,on a runway in Jakarta, during taxiing in São Paulo, or parked beside a generic corporate fleet in Oslo,Klein’s work lands like a glitch in the visual field. A disruption of the technocratic gloss of modern air travel. A reminder that the sky, too, can be colonized by art.

Since this piece was written we have heard that the B&A is reportedly in talks with Klein to acquire her entire series of aircraft skins in digital replica form.

Excavating the Algorithmic Sublime: The Work of Eira Varn

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Among the constellation of post-material digital artists emerging in the past decade, the formidable presence of Eira Varn has become a touchstone for critical debate. A figure equally at home in speculative philosophy and computational aesthetics, Varn’s practice orbits around one deceptively simple question: What does it mean to make art in a world where the material has become metaphysically irrelevant?

Born in 1989 in Helsinki but often described as a “non-geographic” artist, Varn’s early works were dismissed as opaque,dense video, sculptural assemblages and spliced open-source footage. But with the unveiling of her 2021 opus, “Substrate Will Not Save You,” critics were forced to contend with a practice that had moved beyond formal experimentation into something far more difficult to pin down.

Varn’s art now resists simple description. Her pieces exist inside custom neural environments,interior algorithmic systems that evolve autonomously. The works mutate across time, trained on esoteric data such as 16th-century meteorological notations and abandoned GitHub repositories. The resulting outputs evoke the uncanny melancholia of relics that were never quite real.

Critics have attempted to classify Varn’s work as “post-medium,” “neuro-generative,” or even “meta-phenomenological,” but such terms barely scratch the surface. More accurately, her practice might be located within what theorist Amira Nze refers to as the algorithmic sublime,a genre of aesthetic experience that overwhelms not through scale or grandeur, but through its ontological opacity. In Varn’s hands, the algorithm becomes not a tool of control, but a site of divination: oblique, self-obfuscating, and never quite addressable by human cognition.

In her 2023 exhibition “Axiomatic Remains” at the Kunsthalle Birmingham, viewers were presented with a room of blank screens that emitted only spectral humming and intermittent pulses of near-blinding light. The press release contained nothing but an excerpt from a Spinozan treatise: the audience had to trust that the work was there, even if its visibility was ephemeral.

Yet the most fascinating element of Varn’s work isn’t its inaccessibility,it’s its ethical ambiguity. By generating works that resist authorship, permanence, and even interpretation, Varn denies the viewer the usual consolations of comprehension. She replaces the artist-subject inside a system with a set of evolving rules that are never fully disclosed.

To engage with Varn’s work is not to decode it, but to dwell within its milieu. It asks of us a new form of spectatorship,one that is less about reception than attunement, less about aesthetic pleasure than metaphysical risk.

And perhaps this is where Varn’s legacy will ultimately reside: not in objects or exhibitions, but in the philosophical residue her work leaves behind. An artist of shadows and systems, Varn invites us not to observe,but to wait, as the substrate pulses, and the unknowable unfolds.

A Grammar of Grief: The Art of Elias Favière and the Alchemy of Tears

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By Julien Rochefort, Ph.D. for the Handbook of Lesser-known Artists

Department of Contemporary Aesthetics, École Normale Supérieure

In the kaleidoscopic history of art, there emerge now and then figures so singular in vision, so hermetically devoted to their personal lexicon of materials, that they appear to exist outside of chronology altogether. Such is the case with Elias Favière (b. 1947), the French-Swiss conceptual artist whose sole medium for over half a century has been human tears,his own and, in carefully arranged collaborations, those of others. In the taxonomy of material-based art practices, Favière’s body of work occupies a rarefied position: ephemeral yet empirical, intimate yet political, aesthetic yet affective.

To engage with Favière’s corpus is to enter a visual tradition that eschews spectacle in favour of sensation; that devalues permanence in favour of presence; that views the tear not merely as evidence of emotion, but as a physical residue of interiority, a distilled articulation of the ineffable. His work belongs less to the realm of painting or sculpture than to what we might call ritualized affective epistemology.

Origins: An Artist of Loss and Distillation

Favière was born in Lausanne, Switzerland, in 1947, to a librarian mother and a father who ran a small observatory. He was raised in silence, or close to it,his mother lost her voice after a traumatic incident in her youth, communicating through a system of written notes and glances. Favière has described his childhood as “an apprenticeship in the art of noticing.” He learned, early, that emotion did not need sound to register.

Trained in the 1960s at the Beaux-Arts in Paris, he was initially involved with the Support/Surface group but quickly diverged, claiming they were “too attached to canvas, too afraid of the invisible.” His first mature works, collectively titled Larmes isolées (1969,1972), were sheets of blotting paper stained with his own tears, arranged in grids and annotated with date, mood, and ambient temperature. Critics dismissed them as adolescent sentimentality. But philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy would later call these early works “a cartography of vulnerability.”

Method: Weeping as Aesthetic Labor

Favière developed a method for harvesting his tears that bordered on monastic. He constructed a ritual space in his Geneva atelier,a soundproof room with dim lighting and a worn armchair,where he would sit for hours recalling painful memories, sometimes inducing tears through poetry or recordings of loved ones’ voices. The tears were gathered with glass pipettes, then dropped onto linen, paper, glass, or even stone.

A second phase of his career, beginning in the 1980s, involved collaborative weeping: performances in which visitors were asked to recall the last time they cried, and then guided, sometimes wordlessly, into emotional release. The collected tears,always voluntarily given,were recorded, catalogued, and stored in glass ampoules, labeled with initials and date.

Favière insists that he does not seek to manipulate or exploit emotion. “A tear,” he wrote in his 1987 manifesto Les Salines de l’Âme, “is not a confession. It is a mineral event that occurs when the soul exceeds the body’s capacity to contain it.”

Reception: From Margins to Canon

For decades, Favière remained at the periphery of the European art world. His refusal to sell tear-based works,he regarded commodifying them as “profane”,meant that his exhibitions often consisted of empty vessels, faded stains, or atmospheric installations. One early critic called him “the artist of absence.” Another, more charitably, wrote: “He paints with salt and memory.”

It was not until the early 2000s, when interest in affect theory, embodiment, and ephemeral media gained critical traction, that Favière’s practice was reappraised. A landmark retrospective at the Kunsthalle Basel in 2009, Sel et Silence, repositioned him not as a marginal eccentric but as a proto-conceptualist whose use of the body as archive anticipated later movements.

In 2015, the Fondation Repanu devoted a major show to his collaborative series Lacrymographies, in which tear-stained surfaces were scanned at ultra-high resolution and displayed alongside the narratives of the weepers. The show was lauded as “a museum of inner weather.”

Metaphysics of the Tear

What does it mean to make art from tears? For Favière, the answer is not purely metaphorical. The tear, as he understands it, is not a signifier of pain, but an alchemical precipitate of truth. Just as medieval alchemists sought to purify base matter into gold, Favière regards the act of weeping as the transmutation of inner complexity into visible clarity.

There is also an ethical dimension. In an age of surveillance, oversharing, and curated online grief, Favière’s work asks: What is the value of feeling when it cannot be commodified? How can one preserve dignity in the midst of emotional exposure?

His later works take this further. In Osmose (2021), he constructed a room filled with mist formed from evaporated tears collected over three decades. Visitors reported feeling a sensation of “shared sorrow.” Others wept spontaneously. It was unclear whether the art caused tears or the tears became the art.

Legacy and Present Practice

Now in his late 70s, Favière continues to work in near anonymity. He has refused all offers to digitize or NFT his tear works, calling the idea “a tragicomic misunderstanding of presence.” He lives between Geneva and a small village in Ardèche, maintaining what he calls a “liquid archive” of over 4,000 labeled vials of tears,his and others.

He has never taken on students, but his influence is evident in the work of many younger artists exploring the aesthetics of fragility, ritual, and embodied emotion. In a recent interview (his first in over a decade), he remarked: “The history of painting is a history of surfaces. I wanted to know what would happen if we painted with what lies beneath.”

Final Words: Salt as Substance, Not Symbol

Elias Favière’s work may not yet fill auction houses or dominate museum gift shops. It resists replication. It resists permanence. It may, ultimately, resist even history itself.

And yet, his tears endure,not in their physical form, which inevitably evaporates, but in their conceptual potency. They mark a quiet, radical proposition: that the body’s most humble fluid might serve as a medium not for artifice, but for truth.

“I do not cry to be seen,” he wrote. “I cry to remember that I am still capable of feeling.”

Art in Motion: Dafydda ap Gruffydd’s Parkour as Fine Art

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There are few artists alive today who make motion itself the medium. Fewer still approach that motion with the grace, precision, and brilliance of Dafydda ap Gruffydd. Known for her enigmatic land art and long-distance walking projects, Dafydda has recently turned her quiet, relentless attention to an unlikely new canvas: parkour.

Parkour, often associated with urban rebellion and kinetic bravado, is reborn in Dafydda’s work as a form of contemplative sculpture,a choreography of refusal and respect. “I don’t leap,” she says in her typically understated tone, “I negotiate.” For Dafydda, vaulting a handrail is not about athleticism but about communion,with gravity, with architecture, with the land.

Her performances are fleeting. She will arrive in a location unannounced: a crumbling brick underpass in Swansea, a derelict footbridge outside Aberystwyth, or most recently, a half-forgotten cattle path in the Brecon Beacons. There, with almost monastic reverence, she executes what she calls “slow-parkour”,a hybrid of land art, movement study, and Welsh metaphysics. Each gesture is purposeful, but not necessarily dramatic; each landing is softened, nearly silent. There are few audiences. No cameras. Only the land watching back.

“I’m trying to bring qwest into physical form,” she explains, referencing the untranslatable Welsh term that recurs in all her statements. “Parkour becomes a kind of vertical walking. Not just across space, but up it,over it. Through it. For no reason, and yet absolutely necessarily.”

Indeed, Dafydda’s entire practice orbits around this concept of the obscure pilgrimage. Her previous project, Walking at Exactly 1.3 mph from Land’s End to Bristol, was cut short due to family responsibilities, but not before gaining her quiet renown among the walking-arts community. Her twin circumnavigations of the globe,performed in a pair of now-enshrined flip-flops,cemented her as a practitioner of extreme durational absurdism, equal parts sincerity and satire.

Now, in her parkour work, that tension has become elastic. There is comedy in watching a woman clamber slowly over a stile she could have easily bypassed. There is pathos in the way she flattens her body against a disused climbing wall, not to scale it, but to feel its temperature. “I’m not conquering anything,” she insists. “I’m listening.”

Her new book, How to Walk across your Living Room by Someone Who Has Walked across their Living Room, due for release this summer, furthers this ethos. The title masks a text that is quietly radical,a kind of anti-manifesto in which domestic terrain becomes the site of spiritual awakening. She refers to hallways as “corridors of becoming” and insists that we “make steps with full attention.” One footnote simply reads: “Have you tried rolling under your coffee table today?”

For Dafydda, parkour is less an act of defiance than of reverence. It is a method of acknowledging the vertical dimensions of human presence,climbing a wall not to escape, but to inhabit. She sees no contradiction between the wildness of her rural upbringing on Skomer Island and the concrete clutter of a cityscape. Both are landscapes. Both are temporary. And both, if stepped on just so, might whisper back.

As land artists increasingly grapple with questions of permanence, footprint, and environmental ethics, Dafydda ap Gruffydd offers a new proposition: that the most profound gesture might be the one that leaves no trace, not even a heel print in the dust. Her parkour is not showy, is hardly documented. It’s not about reaching the other side of the rail. It’s about the obscure reasons you decided to climb it in the first place. That, she reminds us, is the heart of qwest.

Collectors interested in Dafydda’s upcoming non-announced parkour interventions are encouraged to look out of their windows hopefully at precisely the right time.You never know…

Van Gogh (Not that one): Cartographer of Intention

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pho To: The Unpredictable Eye of a Generation

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In the lexicon of contemporary art photography, few names ring with such poetic irony as Pho To. Born in Vietnam and now a fixture of avant-garde visual culture, Pho To’s rise has been as unpredictable and evocative as his work itself. The name, inherited from a great-grandfather who never touched a camera, seems now less a coincidence than a quiet prophecy,a linguistic relic that gestated for generations before finding its ultimate referent.

Pho To did not always intend to become a photographer. In fact, his trajectory into visual media was, like so much of his practice, marked by serendipity. After relocating to the UK to study veterinary science and sculpture at the Barking School of Art, Pho soon found himself alienated by the rigidity of anatomical discipline and the self-referential aloofness of contemporary sculpture. The pivot came in the form of an incidental gift: a battered 35mm camera, passed on by a fellow art student who was divesting himself of all worldly possessions in what Pho later described as a “slow-motion Dadaist performance.” The camera, then, was both relic and catalyst,an object imbued with layers of relinquishment, risk, and renewal.

“I didn’t realise there was anything special about my name until I came to England,” Pho recalls. “Then people began to smile or make puns when I introduced myself. I suppose it’s fitting. My whole practice is about names, about misreadings, about light being both present and lost.”

Indeed, Pho’s photographic work is at once lyrical and illegible. He is a practitioner of what might be called aleatory imaging,a technique rooted in chance, miscalibration, and deliberate occlusion. Working primarily with analog equipment, Pho eschews predictability in favor of what he calls “contingent seeing.” He frequently sets his manual camera to randomized exposure, aperture, and focus values before shooting. Sometimes he leaves the lens cap on. Sometimes he takes entire rolls of film with his eyes closed. “I don’t want to be the king of the image,” he says. “I want to be the medium through which accidents speak.”

This artistic sensibility has its intellectual ancestry in the Situationists, the Japanese Provoke movement, and the writings of Vilém Flusser, who saw the photographer not as a master but as a servant of the apparatus. Like these predecessors, Pho To treats the camera not as a tool of control but as an agent of disruption. His photographs oscillate between abstraction and documentary, between presence and absence. They are grainy, overexposed, underdeveloped, sometimes barely photographs at all. And yet, in their failure to conform to expectations, they open a new aesthetic horizon,one in which the very notion of authorship is gently undone.

Pho’s most recent series, The Gesture of Forgetting, was exhibited at the Palais de Cherbourg in Paris, and subsequently acquired in part by the Truro Modern. Comprising 108 images shot over six days in Istanbul, the series resists coherent narrative or spatial mapping. The photographs are uncaptioned, untitled, and hung in no discernible order. Viewers wander the gallery as one might wander a city after dark,disoriented, alert, alive.

In interviews, Pho speaks less like a photographer and more like a philosopher. “We think we see with our eyes,” he muses, “but often we only see with our memory. Photography, when it’s most honest, breaks that circuit. It lets us see something we cannot name.”

And perhaps that is the paradoxical gift of Pho To: to make visible what is otherwise refused by clarity. In an age of visual saturation and algorithmic certainty, he offers instead opacity, mystery, and the sublime terror of randomness. His work reminds us that vision itself is fragile, fractured, and always already mediated.

We are used to photographers who seek the perfect light. Pho To seeks the shadow behind it. He may have once studied to be a vet, but it is in the wounded, wild realms of vision that he has found his true calling.

Selected Exhibitions:

• The Gesture of Forgetting, Palais de Cherbourg, Paris (2024)

• Serration: Images Against Meaning, Dungeness Gallery (2023)

• Negative Space, Modern Art Gallery, Windermere (2022)

Publications:

• Monochrome Misfires

• Pho To: A Catalogue of Errors

Reframing the Grid: The Pixel Art of P1X3L

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

The Pixel as Ontology

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

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

Reframing the Canon

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

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

Between Nostalgia and Formalism

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

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

Digital Embodiment

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

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

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

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

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

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