At last a group exhibition worthy of the Halberd Gallery’s large, post-industrial space. Vesper Til Now is not merely an art show,it is an epochal reckoning, a blinding, glittering collision of image, object and sensation. From the first footstep across the custom-poured resin floor (a phosphorescent nod to Yves Klein’s Anthropometries), one is plunged into a universe so intoxicating, so vividly alive, I had to sit down. Twice.
Let’s start with the undisputed centrepiece: Elodia Varn’s Apocrypha in Cobalt. This six-metre suspended triptych made of hand-spun indigo silk, ossified candle wax and worn-out paint-brushes, is a devotional object of such staggering intensity it practically levitates. On seeing it, I wept. Critics who once compared Varn to Annette Messager or early Cornelia Parker must now readjust. This is no longer derivative.
But oh, it only deepens.
Jonjo Spint’s kinetic alabaster drones flit silently over one’s head, drawing calligraphic patterns in the air with biodegradable incense smoke,faint, ephemeral echoes of Tàpies’ spiritual materiality, but laced with tech-noir dread. You haven’t lived until you’ve experienced one of these exquisite machines waft over your face – while you attempt to understand the morse code chirping all around. It is sublime theatre.
And speaking of theatre, the show also includes Andrée-Lou Fancher’s performance piece, Industrialise, Canal, Unfurled? It is both a ballet and a biopsy. Fancher, clad in mourning garb, writhes her way across the floor in a perfect circle, leaving a trail of walnut whips where she has been. People applauded mid-performance, and to her credit Fancher was not put off her stride.
The curatorial hand of Willem LeClerc is, as ever, a triumph of intellect and instinct. His decision to juxtapose Albanian concrete futurism with Ghanaian textile abstraction is not merely bold,it is prophetic. At times, it feels like he is speaking directly to the catalogues raisonnés of Malevich, Bourgeois, and Caravaggio, and they are answering his call.
One emerges from Vesper Til Now not so much changed as recalibrated. This is not art for the meek, the tired, or the slow of wit. This is a show that devours chronology, spits out orthodoxy, and leaves you trembling, aflame with ideas, and suspicious that everything you’ve ever loved is a pale echo of this moment.
In the words of the late and criminally underrated critic Jean-Maurice Desrosiers, who spoke after seeing a previous exhibition curated by LeClerc, “To encounter genius is to be seared. I have been seared. Nothing in life will be the same after this exhibition. Thank you Willem.”
GO TO THIS SHOW! GO NOW. In years to come, tell your grandchildren you were there. They’ll envy you for the rest of their lives.