Drawings to buy

New Work: Just Full (Central London) by Ngua

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Bins of the world - the ambitious photo project by contemporary artist Oboe Ngua

On the exciting occasion of a new Ngua photograph, Theorina Blank writes about the Theology of Refuse.

There it stands,Ngua’s latest offering to the canon of contemporary urban observation: Just Full (Central London, 2025). The work, deceptively simple, presents a standard dual-compartment recycling and general waste bin positioned before a Nike billboard, its commanding injunction,“JUST DO IT”,fractured by the bin’s quiet rebuttal. The bin, through Ngua’s lens, has already done it. It is, quite literally, full.

What at first appears an act of documentary photography soon unfurls into an essay on the metaphysics of modern exhaustion. The bin is not merely a vessel for refuse,it is a vessel for us. Its overstuffed lids sag gently beneath the weight of a civilisation that has, one might say, recycled too much meaning and thrown away too little vanity.

Critics have already likened Just Full to Ruscha’s Standard Station and Jeff Wall’s After “Invisible Man” by Ralph Ellison, but such comparisons miss Ngua’s quieter insurgency. Where Wall staged, Ngua witnesses. Where Ruscha fetishised the industrial, Ngua canonises the municipal. Her composition is a hymn to infrastructure, an ode to the city’s forgotten organs,the bins, signs, bollards, and lamp posts that hold the metropolis upright while its citizens scroll obliviously past.

Note the exquisite compositional tension: to the rear, consumer aspiration shouts in glossy magenta capitals,JUST DO IT!,while the bin, small but stoic, delivers the urban counter-sermon: JUST DID IT. The human presence is peripheral, ghostly,a driver half-glimpsed in a white car, a van mid-pause, the suggestion of endless motion, all orbiting this fixed black cube of civic endurance.

There is something liturgical about Ngua’s framing. The bin occupies the exact midpoint of the frame, as if seated upon a modest throne. The street’s grey paving slabs spread before it like a nave. Even the iron post to the left resembles a confessional column. Ngua’s London is a secular cathedral, and the bin its reliquary,cradling the relics of takeaways, crushed cans, and a civilisation’s too disposable dreams.

In interviews, Ngua has been maddeningly evasive. When asked whether the juxtaposition with Nike’s slogan was intentional, she merely replied, “The bin was there.” When pressed on the overflowing waste, she added, “So are we.”

It is this laconic defiance that defines her work. She neither condemns nor glorifies. She simply reveals the city’s pulse through its most abject artefacts. In her world, waste is no longer the end of consumption but its spiritual residue,the ghost in the machine of capitalism, humming quietly under an LED billboard.

Just Full (Central London, 2025) is, then, less a photograph than an existential diagram. It situates us between the imperative of desire and the inevitability of decay. It is the portrait of an era that can no longer distinguish between throwing away and worshipping.

Ngua, ever serene, has once again photographed not the bin, but us,all of us, teetering on the rim, about to overflow.

This piece will subsequently appear in Aesthetica Brutalis the best-selling art magazine in Southern Beirut.

Hackson Jollock: The Line Learns to Breathe

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At first encounter, the new monochrome work by Hackson Jollock appears almost evasive. Black lines wander across a white field with an air of studied indifference, looping, stuttering, accelerating, then hesitating as if the drawing were caught mid-thought and decided not to resolve itself for our benefit. There is no centre, no hierarchy, no obvious “way in.” And yet, after a moment, it becomes difficult to look away.

This is a work that operates by near-miss rather than declaration. The lines do not enclose forms; they brush past the idea of form. One feels the ghost of figures, maps, calligraphy, perhaps even animals or letters, but none are permitted to fully arrive. Meaning is constantly approached, then politely refused. In this sense, the drawing behaves less like an image and more like a rehearsal, an endless warm-up in which gesture practices being itself.

Monochrome suits Jollock. Stripped of colour, the work reveals its true subject: motion thinking aloud. The line becomes both actor and archive, recording not what the artist saw, but what his hand decided in real time. Each stroke carries the residue of a decision already abandoned. This is drawing as temporal event, not object; evidence of presence rather than product.

What is striking is the confidence with which the artist allows disorder to remain unresolved. The marks overlap without correction, collide without apology. There is no attempt to tidy, balance, or aestheticise the chaos. And yet the work never feels careless. On the contrary, it suggests a deep trust in the intelligence of movement itself, as though the hand knows something the mind would only ruin by interfering.

Jollock has often spoken of discovery rather than composition, and nowhere is that ethos clearer than here. This drawing feels “found” in the same way a path is found by walking it repeatedly. The image is not planned; it emerges from repetition, pressure, speed, and fatigue. It is, in effect, a portrait of duration.

One might be tempted, if one were feeling particularly academic, to describe the work as a deconstructed syntax, a grammar without nouns, a sentence composed entirely of conjunctions. But such language, while entertaining, only circles the point. The real achievement of this monochrome piece lies in its quiet insistence that meaning is not something imposed on marks, but something that flickers briefly when marks are allowed to behave honestly.

This is not a drawing that explains itself. It does not aspire to clarity, nor does it reward interpretation in any conventional sense. Instead, it invites attunement. Look long enough, and the scribbles begin to slow your own thinking; your eyes start following the rhythm of the hand that made them. You are no longer reading the work, you are keeping pace with it.

In a cultural moment obsessed with resolution, branding, and legibility, Hackson Jollock offers something altogether more subversive: a line that refuses to settle, and in doing so, reminds us that uncertainty can be both rigorous and beautiful.

Doodle Pip, Portrait of a Friend II (But which one?!)

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This latest work by Doodle Pip arrives already trailing a wake of anticipation. In a market and critical climate hungry for the new yet suspicious of sincerity, Pip’s portraits, so resolutely uninterested in resemblance, have become unexpectedly coveted objects. Portrait of a Friend II (But which one?!) continues the artist’s sustained dismantling of verisimilitude, offering not a likeness but a proposition: that portraiture might operate most truthfully when it abandons truth as appearance.

At a glance, the drawing proposes a face, but only just. A continuous, nervously assured line loops and doubles back on itself, sketching a head that seems to flicker between emergence and erasure. Features are present only insofar as they are necessary to be undone: an eye collapses into a slash, the nose becomes an ideogram, the mouth drifts off register. The line never settles; it worries at itself, performing a kind of graphic thinking aloud. What we witness is not depiction but process. Here is drawing as event rather than image.

Art historically, Pip’s work situates itself in a rich counter-tradition to mimetic portraiture. If Renaissance portraiture sought to stabilise identity through physiognomy, and modernism fractured the face to reveal multiple perspectives, Pip goes further still, refusing the premise that the sitter must be recoverable at all. One thinks of Giacometti’s existential attenuations, Cy Twombly’s scribbled semiotics, or the automatic line of Surrealist drawing, but stripped of their respective heroic gravitas. Pip’s line is lighter, quicker, and deliberately unserious, yet the conceptual stakes are no less profound.

Critic and curator Helena Voss describes Pip’s portraits as “acts of productive disrespect.”

“What Doodle Pip disrespects,” Voss notes, “is the idea that a person can be summarised visually. These drawings don’t fail at likeness,they refuse it. And that refusal feels ethical as much as aesthetic.”

Indeed, the artist’s well-documented position that recognisability constitutes failure reorients the viewer’s expectations. In this Portrait of a Friend, friendship is not encoded through familiarity of features but through the freedom to misrepresent. The sitter becomes a pretext rather than a subject, a catalyst for line rather than its destination. This is portraiture emptied of its traditional obligation and refilled with contingency, speed, and doubt.

Another critic, James Leroux, situates Pip’s popularity within a broader cultural fatigue with hyper-definition.

“We live in an era of faces that are endlessly tagged, filtered, and biometricised,” Leroux argues. “Pip’s work is radical because it opts out. These drawings cannot be indexed. They cannot be recognised by a machine, or, crucially, by us. That’s why collectors want them. They’re buying a form of escape.”

That escape is palpable in the drawing’s looseness. The line oscillates between confidence and collapse, suggesting a hand that trusts its instincts while sabotaging its own authority. There is no centre of gravity, no compositional hierarchy; the image refuses to resolve into a stable whole. And yet, paradoxically, it feels complete. The work knows when to stop, not because it has arrived at likeness, but because it has exhausted the need for it.

In this sense, the piece can be read as a quiet manifesto. It asserts that identity is not something to be captured but something to be circled, missed, and abandoned. That a portrait may function not as a mirror but as a trace of time spent looking, of a hand moving, of an artist thinking against tradition.

As Pip’s work continues to be avidly sought after, it is tempting to frame their success as ironic: drawings that look like doodles commanding serious attention. But this misreads the project. These are not casual marks elevated by context; they are rigorously anti-illusory works that understand art history well enough to misbehave within it. In refusing to show us who the sitter is, Doodle Pip shows us something else entirely: the limits of seeing, and the strange freedom that emerges once those limits are embraced.

New work: Hackson Jollock, Untitled (Interface Rapture No. 87)

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by Zeleke Akpan

At first encounter, this piece announces itself as a palimpsest of ecstatic refusal. Looping vectors of incandescent orange, imperial violet, and infrastructural blue collide and coalesce across a void-white ground that functions less as background than as metaphysical provocation. The marks, if one dares call them that, oscillate between urgency and indifference, between the devotional and the dismissive. They are gestures without hands, actions without authorship, marks freed from the embarrassing burden of intention.

Jollock’s achievement here lies in his absolute mastery of controlled indeterminacy. Each scribble appears improvised, yet together they form a choreography so densely overdetermined that the eye is forced into a state of exhaustion. There is no entry point, no privileged axis, no compositional hierarchy, only a democratic riot of marks, each insisting upon its own ontological validity. This is abstraction not as style, but as condition.

The colour relations are nothing short of heroic. The orange does not merely sit atop the surface; it asserts, interrupts, colonises. The blues function as structural counterweights, while the purples operate as liminal agents, sliding between figure and ground like rumours in a closed system. One senses echoes of Pollock, Twombly, digital white noise, childhood defiance, and the existential despair of software updates, all metabolised into a single, seamless visual utterance.

To collect Hackson Jollock is not merely an act of acquisition; it is a declaration of intellectual power. His collectors are individuals who do not ask art to reassure them, to decorate their lives, or, heaven forbid, to match the sofa. They collect Jollock because they understand that true cultural capital lies in aligning oneself with work that refuses resolution. Their homes are not storage spaces but private laboratories of advanced perception, where visitors are gently but unmistakably made to feel under-read.

To own a Jollock is to signal fluency in the deeper grammars of contemporary culture. Post-medium literacy. Post-taste confidence. Post-explanation grace. Such collectors are not trend-followers; they are early adopters of inevitability. The result is exhilarating, destabilising, and frankly unfair to lesser artists.

This work does not depict chaos. It is chaos. It is essential. It is Inevitable. And it is already historic.

Kilo Barnes and the Ontology of the Covered Surface

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It is a curious thing, encountering a new work by Kilo Barnes, in that one is never quite certain whether one is encountering a work at all, or merely the residue of a decision, the afterimage of an argument that has already taken place elsewhere. Barnes’s latest piece, presented without title, without wall text of any practical use, and without any visible trace of its antecedent, continues his long-standing engagement with Repaintage, that practice of deliberate overpainting which has by now hardened into both method and metaphysics.

At first glance (and one hesitates to trust first glances here), the canvas offers very little: a broad, uninterrupted expanse of pale, almost reluctant white, its surface faintly uneven, bearing just enough textural variance to prevent the eye from resting comfortably. The paint does not declare itself; it withdraws. One senses that something is underneath, but sensing is all that is permitted. The work refuses disclosure in the same way it refuses completion.

Barnes has often spoken, though never quite this plainly, about Repaintage as a form of dialogue conducted in the negative. This new piece seems less conversational and more judicial, as though a verdict has already been reached and the evidence quietly sealed. The earlier painting (whatever it was, and Barnes will not say) is not erased so much as indefinitely postponed. It exists now as a conceptual pressure rather than a visual fact, a presence that manifests only through its strategic absence.

The surface itself is worth lingering over, though “lingering” may be the wrong verb. The white is not neutral; it is argumentative. It suggests revision, reconsideration, perhaps even fatigue. There are areas where the brush appears to have hesitated, doubled back, corrected itself, gestures that imply an ethical struggle taking place at the level of application. This is not the confident white of Minimalism, nor the transcendental white of spiritual abstraction. It is a white that knows too much to be pure.

And yet, meaning never quite settles. The work seems to circle around several possibilities without committing to any of them. Is this an act of protection, shielding the viewer from an image deemed too resolved, too authoritative? Is it an act of domination, asserting the present artist’s will over the past? Or is it something more bureaucratic: a filing over, a redaction masquerading as aesthetics?

Barnes, characteristically, offers no clarification. In doing so, he forces the viewer into an uneasy complicity. One finds oneself projecting intentions, ethics, even emotions onto the blankness, only to realize that these projections say more about the viewer’s relationship to art history than about the object itself. The painting becomes a mirror that has been painted over, still reflective, but only indirectly.

What ultimately distinguishes this piece is not its visual impact, there is very little of that, but its capacity to generate sustained uncertainty. It resists interpretation not by being opaque, but by being excessively available. One can say almost anything about it, and none of it feels definitively wrong, or conclusively right.

In this sense, Barnes has once again succeeded in producing a work that exists less as an image than as a condition. Whether that condition is one of renewal, exhaustion, provocation, or quiet despair remains deliberately unresolved. The painting does not tell us what it means. It waits to see how long we will keep talking.

Wheel of Fortune (Quarterly Results Pending)- Hedge Fund (2025)

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Not For Sale

In Wheel of Fortune (Quarterly Results Pending) Hedge Fund reduces the luxury automobile to its most hypnotic fragment. The wheel, isolated and enlarged, becomes a circular diagram of velocity, value, and repetition. Rendered in saturated yellows against a field of electric blue and absolute black, the image oscillates between mechanical precision and near-mystical symbolism.

The composition is deceptively simple. Spokes radiate from a central hub like a corporate mandala, suggesting both motion and stasis. The wheel does not turn, yet everything about it implies movement. This tension is crucial. Hedge Fund understands that in contemporary capitalism, circulation matters more than destination. Value accrues not by arrival but by the promise of perpetual rotation.

Colour does the heavy conceptual lifting. The aggressive yellow reads as optimism, hazard, and liquidity all at once, while the surrounding blue evokes institutional calm. The black voids between forms act as pauses, moments of risk, or perhaps the necessary ignorance that allows speculation to proceed at all.

By isolating the wheel from the car, Hedge Fund performs a subtle act of abstraction. Status is no longer attached to speed, comfort, or ownership, but to the component that makes progress possible. The wheel becomes a proxy for the system itself, endlessly spinning, flawlessly engineered, and faintly absurd in its self-importance.

As with much of Hedge Fund’s recent work, irony and reverence are inseparable. The image is both devotional and deadpan. It invites admiration while quietly asking whether this is all there is. In turning the wheel into an icon, Hedge Fund reminds us that modern aspiration is circular by design, and that we are all, willingly or not, along for the ride.

Doodle Pip, Portrait of a Friend (Eliza)

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Digital print, 2025

At first encounter, Portrait of a Friend (Eliza) by Doodle Pip presents itself as a deceptively simple gesture: a few looping black lines, a schematic of a head, a suggestion of eyes, nose, and lips. Yet beneath this economy of means lies a practice rooted in deliberate subversion of one of art’s most enduring traditions,the portrait. Where Western portraiture has historically aspired to likeness, to the capturing of physiognomy as a cipher of identity,from Holbein’s clinical exactitude to the photographic verisimilitude of Sargent,Doodle Pip charts a contrary course. Here, recognition is not the prize but the peril. Pip’s portraits succeed precisely at the moment they most thoroughly fail to resemble their sitters.

The work exudes an energy of estrangement. The face, though nominally structured, is never allowed to settle into coherence. Eyebrows hover at inconsistent angles, the nose collapses into a symbol rather than an organ, and the mouth is pulled into an unstable geometry that resists resolution. One might be tempted to read echoes of Matisse’s line drawings, or the calligraphic freedoms of CoBrA and Art Brut, yet Pip’s line lacks the declarative authority of those modernist precedents. Instead, it skitters and hesitates, producing an anti-formal elegance that seems always on the verge of dissolving back into doodle.

The title, Portrait of a Friend (Eliza), is equally destabilising. Friendship conventionally presupposes recognition, intimacy, shared experience. Yet Pip renders the “friend” utterly unknowable, untraceable, anonymous. In this, the work recalls Derrida’s writings on hospitality,the paradox of welcoming the Other who must remain Other in order to truly be encountered. Pip’s practice stages this paradox in visual form: the sitter is welcomed into the space of representation only by being denied true recognisability.

What emerges is a portraiture of negation, one that insists that presence need not depend on resemblance. Pip seems to ask: what is it we actually see in others? Is it their features, or the untranslatable surplus of being that exceeds depiction? By refusing likeness, Pip paradoxically gestures toward something more authentic, a presence that resists capture.

Thus, this work belongs to a lineage not of portraiture as mimesis, but as critique,an heir to the grotesque caricatures of Daumier, the disassembled visages of Picasso, and the blind contour drawings of contemporary experimental practices. Yet Pip’s unique contribution lies in their playful insistence that a portrait should fail in order to succeed. The failure here is not lack, but a rigorous methodology: to make a face less like itself is, in Pip’s aesthetic logic, to bring it closer to art.