Reviews

One Star Reviews: The Calcium of Dreams – Toward an Invertebrate Consciousness

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“A Stunning Exploration of Absolutely Nothing”

An exhibition by the visionary choreo-sculpturalist Glinté Pavlova at The Wilhelm Centre for Emergent Visualities

I came to The Calcium of Dreams with an open heart, a functioning brain, and a decent pair of shoes. I left it emotionally concussed, intellectually bludgeoned, and deeply suspicious of mollusks. This show, which bills itself as “a radical unraveling of exoskeletal trauma and the pain of becoming,” manages to combine the sensory thrill of standing in a flooded basement with the intellectual rigour of a dolphin quoting Derrida.

Curated across three floors of The Wilhelm Centre,an institution already infamous for hosting last year’s Sneeze as Praxis,this show is the latest offering from Glinté Pavlova, a Lithuanian-born “articulationist” known for once glueing a taxidermied chihuahua to a Xerox machine. Here, she has turned her sights on “the ancient tensions between softness and structure, organism and architecture, bone and metaphor.”

The moment you enter, you’re greeted by Cephalopod Requiem I, a 12-foot-tall canvas mollusk shell coated in what looks like glitter, Nutella, and hair. Inside, an animatronic mannequin dressed as a Victorian funeral director periodically belches the word “legacy” in five languages. One elderly woman who entered the room when I did simply said, “No,” and walked out.

Not a good start. Unfortunately things only deteriorate from there.

On the second floor, the section labeled The Cartilage Suite offers viewers a chance to walk barefoot across a bed of discarded socks while a projector flashes MRI scans of knees onto a series of melting ice sculptures shaped like reclining nudes. A gallery attendant stood nearby ringing a Tibetan singing bowl every time someone looked confused, which meant the room sounded like an insufferable wind chime shop during an earthquake.

A video installation titled Mollusk as Mind: A Liquid Allegory features Pavlova submerged in a giant bowl of lukewarm almond milk, rotating slowly while reciting a list of 19th-century shipwrecks in reverse chronological order. It runs for six hours. I lasted 40 seconds before I began rooting for the concept of drowning.

Then there’s Calcium Interlude IV: The Oyster Screams, an audio installation played exclusively through floor speakers so you experience it with your feet. It’s described as “a sonification of ancestral pressure points”,what that seems to mean is that it’s 45 minutes of low-frequency moaning and what sounded like someone chewing wetly on rubber gloves. A nearby plaque quoted Pavlova saying, “Sound is texture without the burden of form.”

And then there was the “participatory piece.”

Entitled You Are the Exoskeleton, it involves donning a transparent PVC bodysuit and crawling through a maze of egg cartons while blindfolded, led only by the sound of a recorded Pavlova whispering just too quietly to be understood. I declined to participate, citing dignity. Still, I watched as two grad students took part; both were weeping softly by the end. One sat on the floor muttering whilst the other just rocked back and forth, whispering.

The obligatory gift shop at the end offered merchandise including “boneless memory sachets” (small bags of damp sand with handwritten haikus inside), calcium-themed posters, and a $360 “emotional clam knife” carved from recycled acrylic nails. I bought a pencil just to remind myself that functional objects still exist in the world.

To be perfectly clear: I’m not opposed to challenging art. I’m not a philistine. I once spent three hours watching an artist eat a bicycle whilst riding it, in Berlin. But The Calcium of Dreams is not challenging,it’s exhausting, directionless, and deeply enamored with the sound of its own nonsense.

It is the art-world equivalent of being stuck at a dinner party next to someone who won’t stop talking about their favourite kombucha – yes, I speak from experience.

One star. And that star is shaped like a mollusk, dying slowly in the sun.

One Star Reviews: Rumination in Mixed Media

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A Carnival of Ego and Glue

Review of Rumination in Mixed Media by Rex Caltrop at the Alabama Museum of Objects

There are bad art shows. There are pretentious art shows. And then there is Rumination in Mixed Media, which exists in a rarefied airless void all its own,a vacuum-sealed package of unchecked ego, performance-grade nonsense, and glue gun abuse. It is less a gallery exhibition and more an endurance test conducted under the slow, suffocating weight of someone else’s mushroom-induced epiphany.

Rex Caltrop, who describes himself as a “meta-sculptural dramaturge of the Third Axis,” has produced a body of work so utterly divorced from reality that one begins to suspect he may, in fact, not exist and just be an elaborate prank by rival conceptualists. He claims the show was inspired by “a moment of deep grief during an ayahuasca vision.” I would argue the true inspiration was a burning desire to waste the time of the unsuspecting gallery-going public.

Upon entering the exhibition, you are handed a pair of broken opera glasses and a wooden egg. You are told these are “tools for your encounter.” What they are, in practice, is litter.

The first installation, Sadness Engine #17, features a decommissioned fog machine draped in yoga mats and surrounded by half-melted clown shoes, arranged in a perfect spiral. A placard informs you that this piece “interrogates the skeletal architecture of performance grief.” I stood there for ten minutes, wondering how it did this and hoping the fog machine might turn on and add some interest to the ensemble. It did not.

Across the hall is a video piece titled Mimehole, projected onto a wall of carefully crushed cola cans. It’s a 37-minute film of the artist, nude except for a single roller skate trying to climb a mountain that looked like Ben Nevis. I’m not exaggerating when I say someone in the room whispered “He’s so brave”. I strongly and quietly disagreed.

The largest room in the gallery contains Clownbone: The Reckoning, a “sculptural anti-form” made from deflated pool toys and one enlarged rejection letter from Yale. A lone red balloon sits atop the mess, bouncing around as viewers walk around. I asked a gallery assistant,dressed in full Aston Villa kit, including boots ,what it meant. She said they were forbidden to discuss it.

The final room is an “immersive space” titled Bonezone: A Participatory Collapse. Guests are invited to lie on a vibrating floor mat while attempting to peel an onion with a tuning fork. The room smelt dangerously of used fireworks. The onion made me cry heavily.

To say this show is pretentious is to insult the fine tradition of pretense. This is not even faux-intellectualism. This is meta-pretentiousness,pretentiousness about pretentiousness, a feedback loop of pure, radiant nonsense curated under flickering lights.

I award Rumination in Mixed Media one star, solely because I’m legally unable to give it zero without the risk of a libel suit. The only thing more unhinged than this show is the certainty with which Caltrop speaks about it. He says his work “dismantles the hegemony of punchlines.” I say it’s a clown funeral organised by someone who’s never met the clown.

Avoid at all costs,unless you need a powerful reminder of why Dadaism was a phase, not a blueprint.

One Star Reviews: Henry V at the Mayfair Theatre

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There are moments in the theatre when time seems to stop,when you’re so enraptured by the performances that you forget to breathe. This was not one of those moments. Time not only didn’t stop,it seemed to drag itself across the floor of the Mayfair Theatre like a wounded French horseman begging for the sweet release of death.

Let’s begin with the titular role. Henry V, our valiant king, was played by local TikTok “sensation” Bradly Mews, who delivered Shakespeare’s immortal lines with the emotional range of a dial tone. His “Once more unto the breach” speech was less a rallying cry and more a sleep aid. At one point, a man in the audience audibly yawned, and it received more applause than anything Bradly did all evening. His idea of commanding presence seemed to be squinting dramatically into the middle distance, like he was trying to read a traffic sign without his glasses.

The staging was somehow both minimalist and cluttered. The director, Juniper Wren-Moon (whose last credit was a gender-neutral mime retelling of Cats), decided the entire Battle of Agincourt should be represented using sock puppets and cigarette lighters. I spent ten minutes thinking the theatre was actually on fire, which almost would have been a mercy.

Let’s not forget the chorus,traditionally a unifying narrative force. Here, it was played by a rotating cast of local influencers reading lines off their phones. One of them paused mid-monologue to plug her oat milk brand.

Costuming? Oh, dear. If “medieval raver caught in a Halloween clearance bin” was the goal, then full marks. There was one poor extra whose armor was made entirely out of painted egg cartons. He looked like a budget Dalek, and honestly, I respected him more than Henry.

The French characters were inexplicably performed in exaggerated Pepe Le Pew accents, which might have been funny if it weren’t so lazy. The Dauphin entered on a Segway wearing what I can only describe as a chainmail crop top. He also dabbed after delivering every line.

In the final scene, Katherine of France was wooed not with poetry, but with an acoustic guitar serenade of “Wonderwall.” I can’t say it worked in the context of the play, but it did cause someone in the back to involuntarily shout “NOOOO”.

If I had one positive takeaway, it’s that this production has an end.

In summary: this Henry V was not a band of brothers, but a tragic parade of theatrical crimes. I award it one star, and that star is for the egg carton knight, who, though made of refuse, had more soul than the rest of the cast combined.

One Star Reviews: A Fertile Collapse in Nine Petals by avant-garde legend Bravely M. Jorb

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at The Notting Hill Centre for Artistry

It is rare to attend an art exhibition and leave feeling like you’ve been mugged,not physically, but conceptually. Emotionally. Spiritually. Robbed of time, patience, and your basic understanding of what constitutes “art” versus, say, laundry nailed to a wall. And yet, here we are. Turgid Bloom: A Fertile Collapse in Nine Petals is the latest offering from Bravely M. Jorb, and it is, without question, the most sanctimonious arrangement of floral detritus and art-school word salad I have ever had to witness.

Jorb describes the show as “an odyssey through post-floric semiotics and the latent fertility of failure.” What does that mean? Come with me into the exhibition…

The exhibition is divided into “petals”,nine individual rooms, each allegedly representing a stage in the life cycle of a fictional plant called the Myxoliva spasmata, invented by Jorb “as a rejection of botanical imperialism.” There is a diagram. It includes several question marks, the word “blossom” written backward, and a drawing that suspiciously resembles a giraffe in repose.

Petal I: Germination of Grief is a pile of shredded calendars under a heat lamp. Every five minutes, a fog machine puffs out the scent of mildew while a speaker hidden in the wall emits the sound of someone inhaling deeply, then sighing as if disappointed in you personally. I made eye contact with a stranger across the room and saw myself reflected in their haunted stare: it was unnerving.

In Petal IV: Chlorophyll Envy, visitors are invited to walk across a floor covered in dried wasabi peas while a performer in an over-sized bee costume reads Rilke aloud through a kazoo. A large sign above the doorway warns: “EXPECT TO FEEL POLLINATED.” I did not. I felt irritated and slightly dehydrated, but some of that was my fault for forgetting my water bottle.

The so-called “centerpiece” of the show is Petal VI: Wilt Ritual, a towering sculpture of rotting carnations zip-tied to a metal coat rack, slowly rising and falling according to the weather forecast whilst a slowed-down MIDI version of “The Girl from Ipanema” played on a nearby iPod Nano. I cannot explain to you how viscerally wrong this felt. There are certain things the brain is not built to process, and this is one of them. A child walked in, looked at it for five seconds, and burst into tears. The mother just said, “I know,” and they left without another word.

By the time I arrived at Petal IX: Compost of the Self, I was so broken down I barely flinched when asked to write my “emotional pH level” on a piece of organic rice paper and bury it in a trough of blueberries. I have no idea what the artist was trying to achieve.

The gallery assistants,all dressed in burlap sacks and wearing “scent halos” (necklaces soaked in fermented rosewater),hovered nearby, ready to explain that “each work destabilizes the flower as symbol and repositions it as a wound.” At no point did anyone explain why I had to watch endless CDs of Beethoven’s Fifth falling from the ceiling into a washing-up bowl of green paint.

Let me be clear: Turgid Bloom is not a conversation with nature. It is not a deconstruction. It is not even a critique. It is a profoundly tedious episode of self-worship dressed up in florid metaphors and bad lighting. It is a PowerPoint presentation with delusions of grandeur. It is Bravely M. Jorb holding a bouquet of rotting symbolism and slapping you in the face with it while whispering, “How do you like these apples?”

One star. Everything in the show deserves to be pruned, mulched, and never spoken of again.

Exhibition Review: “High Resolution” by P1X3L

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Hyde Park, London

There’s something poetically inconvenient about climbing thirty feet into a tree to view pixel art. It’s physically undignified, mildly hazardous, and completely impractical. But if there is one thing P1X3L, the elusive digital portraitist and master of the modern icon, understands, it’s the relationship between effort and image.

High Resolution, P1X3L’s latest guerilla exhibition, is a shimmering node of digital presence suspended in the crown of a veteran plane tree in Hyde Park. Accessible only by rope ladder the show consists of twelve pixel-based digital portraits lashed gently to branches with climbing cord and zip ties. The effect is surreal: a cyberpunk shrine nestled in foliage, part-forest altar, part arcade.

Pixels in the Pines: The Work Itself

The portraits,rendered in crisp, 64×64 grid format,depict figures who are simultaneously anonymous and universal. A man in a flat cap whose eyes are just two green squares. A woman with braids made of eight brown pixels. A bishop-like figure constructed entirely from shades of lavender.

P1X3L’s genius lies in emotional compression: the ability to conjure expression from constraint. Each portrait flickers between specificity and abstraction. One moment you’re seeing a tired grandmother. The next, it’s Karl Marx, but in drag. Or is it just a purple blob?

Notably, this show introduces “glitch halos”,pixelated auras of static surrounding each subject’s head, suggesting digital sanctity or impending data collapse. It’s Byzantine iconography remixed with Nintendo aesthetics, and it works.

Climb and Context: Why a Tree?

You could argue that exhibiting pixel art in a tree is needlessly difficult. You’d be right. But P1X3L has long resisted the white cube, preferring pop-up formats that mimic the fleeting nature of online attention. By placing this show in a literal canopy, he forces us to re-embody the digital experience: to strain, to scramble, to sweat just a little in pursuit of the sublime.

One visitor reportedly got stuck halfway up and had to be bribed with a flat white and a 4% discount. Another fainted from sheer exhilaration (or vertigo). Everyone who reached the top agreed on one thing: it felt like a pilgrimage.

Final Verdict: Twigs, Tech, Transcendence

High Resolution is less an exhibition than an aesthetic obstacle course, and all the better for it. In a world where digital art often feels frictionless and instantly consumed, P1X3L asks us to climb, literally and metaphorically.

Yes, it’s hard to get to. But art worth seeing usually is.

Visitor tip: Wear sensible shoes, avoid windy days, and bring a thermos. The view from the canopy,both visual and conceptual,is unforgettable.

Review: Doodle Pip’s Ten Minutes Crammed Into Nine Minutes

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Shortlisted for the Llandudno Art Prize 2025

Doodle Pip has never been an easy artist to summarise. Known mainly for his portraits, he also undertakes elliptical performances and theoretical pranksterism, for example a 2023 installation that consisted entirely of QR codes projected onto Buckingham Palace. He now returns with a film so tightly coiled, so self-consciously compressed, it might be the most Pipian work to date.

Titled Ten Minutes Crammed Into Nine Minutes, the work clocks in , naturally , at exactly nine minutes, though it feels both longer and shorter, depending on which part of your brain you’re watching it with.

Time is a Lie, and Pip is Here to Prove It

Shot on what appears to be 1990s DV tape, 35mm film, a GoPro attached to a snail, and possibly CCTV footage from a dentist’s waiting room, the film begins with a ticking clock , or at least an impression of one. The second hand jerks, then stutters, then speeds up, then disappears. This is your warning: we’re in Doodle Pip territory now, where linear time is more of a rumour than a structure.

A woman narrates the history of an abandoned French amusement park backward.

A man recites a list of missed appointments alphabetically.

An unseen voice apologises continuously for “running late” while the screen displays the word “punctuality” in a dozen fonts.

There’s a moment, roughly five minutes in where the screen briefly goes white. A breath. A pause. Viewers in the screening room glanced at each other. Was it over? Had we been tricked?

No. Doodle Pip returns with a thudding burst of static and a digital calendar flipping furiously through decades. Just as the film’s duration approaches nine minutes suddenly the screen fills with the message, “Ten minutes, well spent.”

Conceptual Maximalism, Minimal Runtime

Though brief, Ten Minutes Crammed Into Nine Minutes is a dense, multi-layered assault on time, memory, and the productivity-industrial complex. You get the sense that every second was negotiated like real estate in Manhattan. Pip has somehow created a work that actively resists being watched casually , it demands your full presence, then quietly mocks you for giving it.

It’s not “difficult” in the traditional avant-garde sense , there are no long shots of a car rusting or inexplicable Icelandic motifs (though there is a recurring image of a melting parking meter). Rather, it’s the speed of the piece that destabilises. The brain is forced to do interpretive gymnastics. There’s no space for comfort, only compression.

In a way, it’s a perfect piece for our times:

• Overstimulated.

• Chronically running behind.

• Obsessed with squeezing the maximum out of the minimum.

The Final Frame: Or Is It?

The last second is a simple black screen with white Helvetica text:

“There was enough time.”

As the lights come up, there was an audible exhale from the audience. One viewer muttered, “I want to watch it again,” and I heard another add insincerely, “Yeah, but backwards.”

Verdict

Doodle Pip’s Ten Minutes Crammed Into Nine Minutes is not just a film , it’s an experiment in perceptual elasticity, a cleverly disorienting meditation on how we experience art, attention, and our own vanishing hours. It’s short, sharp, and somehow sprawling , a conceptual joke delivered with unnerving sincerity.

The Stick Insects: A Retrospective in Fragments @ Pimlico Wilde, London

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It is rare for a group show to carry the atmospherics of a family saga, but The Stick Insects,a retrospective devoted to the loose collective that grew up around the gravitational figure of L.S. Lowry does just that. It is part soap opera, part scholarship, and only part exhibition. The Pimlico Wilde galleries, long seduced by British post-industrial mythologies, have here staged not just an exhibition but an overview: a half-century of collaboration, fracture, ideological warfare, and intermittent brilliance.

The Stick Insects were never meant to last. Their origin story is the kind of happenstance one expects from art history’s quainter chapters: a group of working-class teenagers from Salford and Manchester, mesmerised by Lowry’s lonely matchstick men, gathered at a draughty community centre in 1953 with the vague aim of “painting the world as it was, not as it wanted to be.” The group’s earliest members,Daphne “Daff” Myles, the moody printmaker Arnold Vetch, twins Basil and Barney Keane, and a preternaturally confident Bernard Tibbins,began as Lowry acolytes, almost cultishly devoted to the older artist. But, as the first room of the exhibition demonstrates, devotion quickly turned dialectical.

Myles’s early linocuts (Moss Side Under Snow, 1955) echo Lowry’s brittle lyricism but are undercut by a new cynicism: factory chimneys cropped like guillotines, the workers reduced to lozenge-like silhouettes that seem actively to resist the viewer’s gaze. Beside her hangs Vetch’s Nightshift Assembly (1956), a painting that inverts Lowry’s flatness into a viscous impasto, the millworkers dissolving into tar-like smears. Lowry himself, who attended their makeshift exhibitions in pub function rooms, famously dismissed the group as “too damp to catch fire.” Yet his ambivalence only strengthened the group’s resolve, and by the early 1960s, the Stick Insects had achieved a kind of regional notoriety as a counter-Lowry,less romantic, more openly political.

Then came the schisms. In 1962, Bernard Tibbins defected to London, lured by a teaching post at the Royal College of Collage. He would later describe the rest of the group as “provincial nostalgists”,an accusation Myles never forgave. The Keane twins’ experimental foray into sculpture (a series of uncanny industrial totems fashioned from dismantled looms and railway sleepers) caused further division. The “Salford Four,” as they were dubbed by a bemused press, broke apart entirely after a furious argument over whether the group should accept funding from the nascent Arts Council.

Pimlico Wilde, wisely, gives each rupture its own room. One can trace how Vetch, embittered by the split, retreated into obsessive monochromes, his palette reduced to a single sludge-like grey. Across the corridor, a vitrine displays Myles’s correspondence with Lowry himself, who by the late 1960s had softened: “Perhaps we are insects after all,” he writes in a spidery hand, “only some of us have learned to climb.”

The group’s reconstitution in 1973 feels almost miraculous in hindsight. A reunion exhibition at Manchester’s Whitworth Art Gallery,fuelled by nostalgia, political despair, and perhaps a degree of financial necessity,saw the Keane twins return from self-imposed rural exile, Myles and Vetch tentatively reconciled, and even Tibbins flying back from London to contribute a single painting (Three Figures at Euston, a mordant nod to his abandonment). That show sold out in a week, and the Stick Insects became, briefly, fashionable. One can almost hear the machinery of fame beginning to whir: interviews in The Observer, a BBC2 documentary narrated by John Betjeman, collectors clamouring for their collective urban lyricism.

But fame corrodes as much as it sustains. By the early 1980s, the group had fractured again, this time permanently. Vetch died in obscurity, Myles withdrew from public life to care for her disabled son, the Keane twins opened a small but disastrous gallery-café in Blackpool, and Tibbins enjoyed a late-career flourish as a kind of northern Anthony Caro, producing large-scale public commissions of dubious quality.

What makes this Pimlico Wilde exhibition so affecting is its refusal to tidy the mess. Curator Gemma Lorenz has resisted the temptation to sand down the group’s contradictions. The Stick Insects’ legacy is not one of linear innovation but of lateral, stubborn attachment,to each other, to a landscape, to a way of seeing the industrial north that was neither romantic nor fully cynical.

One of the last works in the show, Myles’s After Lowry (1990), seems to distill this ambiguity. It is a simple scene: two children on a cobbled street, chalking lines that mimic the tramlines long since ripped up. The palette is muted, the figures faceless, yet the painting radiates an unexpected tenderness. It is impossible not to read it as a quiet farewell,to Lowry, to the group, perhaps even to the idea of collective artistic struggle.

The catalogue essays will tell you that the Stick Insects are enjoying a market revival,Tibbins’s Moss Lane Football Crowd recently sold for a record sum,but the true value of this retrospective lies elsewhere. It demonstrates how minor movements, even those marked by failure, can generate a thick web of influence. One sees their DNA in the grimy social realism of contemporary painters like Chantal Jakes, in the community-mapping projects of the award-winning Forster Collective, even in the anonymous street murals blooming on Salford’s derelict mills.

The Stick Insects were never glamorous, rarely unified, and often unmanageable. But in their awkward persistence, they produced a body of work that still vibrates with a hard-won dignity. “We were always climbing,” Myles once said. “Perhaps we were only insects, but we were climbing all the same.” This exhibition honours that climb without smoothing over the stumbles.

It is, in its own ragged way, a triumph.

Beyond the Banana: A Review of the Exmouth Academy’s Brazil Painting Show

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The Exmouth Academy’s much-anticipated exhibition, “Brushstrokes of Brazil: Liminal Vibrancy in the Tropics”, promises a deep dive into the nation’s contemporary painting scene. What it delivers, however, is a kaleidoscopic fever dream of artistic ambition, chaotic juxtapositions, and more references to post-colonial discourse than even the most ardent political junkie could digest.

I arrived expecting an immersive exploration of the Brazilian psyche via paint. What I encountered was an exhibition that seemed determined to answer the question: “What if we put samba, existential dread, and Rousseau’s jungle fantasies into a blender and forgot to put the lid on?”

The Works

At the heart of the show is a tension between Brazil’s lush, visceral aesthetic heritage and its artists’ relentless pursuit of conceptual complexity. Take, for instance, “O Sol Nunca Me Ama” (The Sun Never Loves Me) by João Cordeiro. This monumental canvas features a hyper-realistic avocado sliced open to reveal a yawning void, its edges inexplicably smeared with gold leaf. A metaphor for globalization? A critique of Brazil’s agricultural dependence? Or just an homage to brunch culture gone wrong? The accompanying wall text,a 650-word manifesto,was as opaque as the pitless avocado itself.

Further along, Larissa Tavares’s “Palimpsesto das Favelas” (Palimpsest of the Favelas) arrests the eye with its maddening refusal to cohere. Tavares layers gauzy washes of color with bursts of angry, abstract scribbles, over which she has collaged what appear to be receipts for pão de queijo. “It’s an interrogation of neoliberal transactionalism,” I overheard one visitor murmur, stroking their chin. But to me, it felt like someone spilled their lunch money on a Jackson Pollock.

And then there’s “Ode ao Mosquito” (Ode to the Mosquito) by Beatriz de Lima, an installation masquerading as a painting. The artist has smeared actual mosquito blood across a stark white canvas while a recording of buzzing drones from the ceiling speakers. It’s a visceral and deeply irritating piece, which I suspect is exactly the point. “The mosquitoes are both the colonizers and the colonized,” one particularly verbose guide explained. “They are the oppressors, yet also victims of the climate crisis. It’s genius.”

The Themes

The show’s overarching curatorial narrative,if one can find it in the chaos,is an attempt to distill Brazil’s artistic identity into something both contemporary and deeply rooted in tradition. This is, of course, an impossible task, and the exhibition doesn’t so much tackle the challenge as gleefully revel in its impossibility.

You’ll find nods to Brazil’s colonial past in nearly every piece, often juxtaposed with jarringly modern elements. One painting featured a meticulously rendered 18th-century sugar mill but dotted with QR codes. When scanned, they directed me to a Spotify playlist featuring only Bossa Nova remixes of the Macarena. Bold? Yes. Meaningful? Perhaps. Overwhelming? Absolutely.

There’s also a distinct sense of ecological urgency running through the works, with many artists addressing deforestation, biodiversity loss, and the commodification of the Amazon. But rather than hammering the viewer with doom, the exhibition opts for a more playful (if baffling) approach. One standout was “Desmatamento #4”, in which artist Raul Pessoa used actual tree sap mixed with acrylics to paint what appeared to be a melancholy toucan smoking a cigarette.

The Experience

The layout of the show is as confounding as the art itself. The gallery walls are painted a deep, pulsating pink,presumably meant to evoke the Brazilian sunset but more reminiscent of a nightclub. Meanwhile, the lighting is erratic, shifting between dim, jungle-like greens and harsh fluorescent whites. At one point, I accidentally walked into what I thought was another room of paintings but turned out to be a live capoeira demonstration. Whether this was intentional or simply an unfortunate scheduling overlap remains unclear.

By the time I reached the gift shop (featuring eco-friendly caipirinha kits and tote bags with the phrase “Art is the Amazon of the Soul”), I felt both intellectually exhilarated and vaguely unmoored.

The Verdict

“Brushstrokes of Brazil” is a triumph of contradictions. It’s a show where beauty and bewilderment collide, where the line between profundity and pretension is gloriously blurred. The paintings might not all resonate, and some might outright baffle, but the exhibition achieves something rare: it forces you to think. Or at least to pretend you’re thinking while desperately googling “symbolism of bananas in post-modern Brazilian art.”

Go see it. Bring an open mind, a willingness to be confused, and, ideally, bug spray.

Weather’d in Our Madness: Hamlet at Ludlow Castle

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Reviewed by Imogen Pye

They say the play’s the thing. But last Friday at Ludlow Castle, the weather was definitely the main event.

In what may go down as the wettest production of Hamlet since records began, the cast of the touring company Company of the Moat battled wind, water, and the rising spectre of hypothermia to deliver a performance as brave as it was barely visible.

What unfolded in the ancient ruin wasn’t just Shakespeare,it was survival theatre. A howling meditation on grief, decay, and precipitation.

A Kingdom Drenched

Even as the audience took their seats beneath flapping tarpaulins and steaming thermoses, it was clear this would not be a gentle night. Rain fell in sheets. Streams raced across the stage. The battlements leaked. The ground pulsed. The Danish court, reimagined on a timber stage, became increasingly indistinguishable from a collapsing raft.

No moment better captured the blurring of art and weather than Ophelia’s infamous descent into madness. As the actress stepped forward to scatter imagined flowers, a real torrent of rainwater surged across the stage, gathering force in the downstage gully.

For a harrowing ten seconds, she slipped, stumbled, and nearly vanished entirely,a literal drowning in real time, inches from Horatio’s boots. The audience gasped.

In any other context it would be a safety concern. Here, it was devastatingly perfect. Nature didn’t just intrude,it collaborated.

The young actor playing Hamlet was clearly dripping wet by his first soliloquy. By “To be or not to be,” he was shivering visibly, his words competing with gale-force winds and what sounded like a helicopter overhead.

And yet, he persisted,delivering each line as if the storm itself were Claudius, and silence the only revenge.

A Play Drenched in Irony

Laertes duelled in what had become a small inland sea, fencing with impressive intensity despite both foils audibly squelching. Polonius died with a splash. Yorick’s skull was nearly lost down a drain. And the gravedigger’s scene played like Beckett on a water slide.

The final tableau, with bodies scattered, rain still hammering down, and a single crow flapping over the ruins, was accidental stagecraft of the highest order. A tragic ending, soaked through with sincerity.

Verdict:

A triumph of drenched ambition, but also, a strong case for better drainage in heritage sites.

Repainting the Canon: Kilo Barnes on the Radical Aesthetics of Repaintage

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By any measure, Kilo Barnes cuts a striking figure in today’s art world: uncompromising, enigmatic, and increasingly influential. At the recent lecture he delivered at the École des Beaux-Arts in Bournemouth , titled simply “Repaintage: Silence and Surface” , the mood was expectant. The large hall was full, the audience a mix of students, critics, and a smattering of curators. Repaintage has become , in certain circles , the most debated artistic development since the rise of post-internet aesthetics. And Barnes is it’s unlikely, and now undisputed, philosopher-in-chief.

To recap: Repaintage is the practice of acquiring existing artworks , from obscure canvases to mid-career masterpieces , and methodically painting over them, often with white gesso or monochrome layers, to create something both new and effacing. It is part gesture, part gesture’s undoing. And if that sounds contradictory, it should. Repaintage thrives in contradiction.

“Every painting contains a refusal”

Barnes began his lecture not with a manifesto, but with a meditation. “The act of repainting,” he said, “is not iconoclasm, but a form of unknowing. Every painting contains a refusal , a decision not made, a silence not voiced. Repaintage enters through that refusal.”

Barnes was erudite, if elliptical. He quoted Riegl and Didi-Huberman in the same breath. He drew parallels to the palimpsests of medieval manuscripts, to the whitewashed frescoes of Reformation churches, to the Zen sand gardens where erasure is part of the ritual. He spoke of the “unseen economy of forgetting” in European museums, and how Repaintage offered not destruction but “a renewal through obliteration.”

A European Moment

Much of the lecture’s weight lay in its geopolitical undertone. Barnes spoke carefully , one senses he is wary of becoming a lightning rod , but acknowledged that Repaintage is gaining notable traction across European art circles, particularly in Germany, the Netherlands, and parts of southern France. In Berlin, a group of young painters calling themselves Die Rückseite (“The Reverse Side”) have begun repurposing found paintings and reselling them as “meta-canvases.” In Amsterdam, a Repaintage retrospective drew record crowds.

A Practice of Ethics, Not Ego

Perhaps the most surprising turn in Barnes’ talk was his emphasis on ethics. In a moment when artistic gestures often risk collapsing into provocation or performance, Barnes insists that Repaintage is “not about the self.” The gesture is not flamboyant but ascetic. “It is harder to cover than to create,” he said. “To paint over is to reckon with legacy, not escape it.”

This runs counter to the popular misreading of Repaintage as a form of appropriation art. Barnes dismissed such comparisons with a polite shrug: “Appropriation retains the image as artifact. Repaintage withholds. It is the ethics of non-disclosure. A silence that speaks in surface.”

Looking Forward, Backwards

The lecture ended not with a call to arms, but with a quote from Mallarmé: Tout aboutit à un livre.(“Everything ends in a book.”) Barnes nodded and surprisingly, took no questions.

As the audience filed out, there was the unmistakable hum of ideas colliding. Something in Barnes’ quiet certainty suggested that Repaintage is more than a movement. In an era of saturation, Repaintage offers absence. In a culture of spectacle, it gives us surface. Blank, but not empty.

Whatever you make of Repaintage , whether it strikes you as profundity or provocation , it’s impossible not to look at what has been painted over, and ask: what remains?